The Yuanfen New Media Art Space is honored to showcase French Canadian artist Jean-François Côté and welcomes the return of Chinese Canadian artist Yam Lau. Jean-François and Yam have come together to create Imagining the Image, a unique exhibit that delves into the perception and conception of the image, moving beyond the typical image vs. reality construct. Although the two artists are divided by differing subject matter and artistic sensibility, they are united in redefining the “image” through experimental logic, weaving together the imaginary, conceptual and concrete.

Yam Lau
"The purpose of my work is to subtract weight from the world."

Yam Lau's Hutong House is an animation created in order to capture the special spatial qualities of the traditional Beijing courtyard house. As Hutong House is a digital construction and produced through the assemblage of images it is not enough to be a house. However, as one watches the deconstruction process and evanescence of the Hutong House, the unfolding of the “house” manages to project the illusion of volume, and through this becomes quite real. The breakdown of the components which make up the animation reveal to the audience that it is not merely a hollow visual representation, but a physical house in the land of zeros and ones. Yam notes: “The animation is the construction of a space I would want to go to, its rhythm is a rhythm by which I would like to live. It is a projection of what I admire most in an ideal China." The animation of a disappearing Hutong House may also be a subtle commentary on the disappearance of much of Beijing’s cultural heritage in the name of progress.

Jean-François Côté
Jean-François' Constructing the Image series is about developing the image by forging together elements from the viewers imagination, the physical and the digital. The works are designed to reveal another type of image, one that does not correspond to any predetermined dimensions or modes of representation. The image is thus virtual in the sense that it is not entirely conditioned by the material reality of any artistic medium. In perceiving this image, the viewer moves inside a work that is not seen or represented. In a way, the viewer walks through the material image of the mediums.