In her films, Nina Yuen visualizes an inner world, a dreamy world in which thoughts and feelings stream onward like words in a book. Or like the surge of a river, the rolling waves of the sea. Just as thoughts and feelings can rage, the ocean pounds, frothing, on the coast. In her latest film, entitled Juanita (2010), Yuen surrenders to that tide, which not only saturates her black hair and dress but completely immerses her outstretched body between the rocks, overpowering it.

Yuen’s inner world is also an outer world. Culture and nature intersect,with a mesmerizing effect. The wind, the leaves on the trees, the water and the animals are equivalent to language and the human imagination. We consistently hear, as a voice-over, the voice of the artist herself. She reads fragments from diaries and letters aloud, repeats fragments of conversations. Personal stories are followed by lyrical references to poets such as Rimbaud or a thought about lifecycles, from an essay by Oliver Sacks: ‘Plants live in a completely different time frame...’

Yuen also quotes Carlos Castaneda, who investigated supernatural phenomena and near-death experiences, in a yearning for lucid dreaming: a higher level of perception. Although she does not use this term specifically, it is precisely where she is enticing us: dreaming, while we are aware that we are dreaming. In the Netherlands, author and psychiatrist Frederik van Eeden championed ‘lucid dreaming’ – clear, mentally alert. It is difficult to find a more accurate description for Yuen’s enchanting mixture of inner and outer world, culture and nature, text and image.

Lucid Dreaming is Nina Yuen’s first solo museum exhibition in the Netherlands. It is a presentation that might be regarded in advance as a jewel, so distinctive and precious is her work. Yuen (1981, Hawaii) followed an art study at Harvard University and subsequently completed the Rijksakademie programme in Amsterdam. In the Stedelijk Museum Schiedam, she makes a spatial installation around four films, including portraits from these works, dating from 2007 to 2011.

In all these films, wires glow between the past and the present. Yuen interweaves space and time. In Rimbaud (2007) she does a rapid role-play with the French Symbolists. Mallarmé, Rimbaud, Valéry, one after the other. She takes their place, with the aid of dishes as hats and a brushed-on moustache. Writers, artists and historical heroes or heroines, such as Jeanne d’Arc (Joan, 2009), meet one another as kindred spirits across the continents, through the centuries. Yuen moves back and forth, light-heartedly and serious in equal measure, between life and the hereafter. Her work is an exercise in the power of representation. Nostalgically, for it knows better, it articulates a stubborn desire to let our power of thought triumph over transience.

In the film David (2010), the David of the title is summoned by his mistress, played by Yuen. She performs girlish rituals in which love and heartache, memories and illusions, superstition and an unbridled sense of beauty are the primary ingredients. To recapture her lover, she utters incantations. Spell to bring a loved one back: on your underwear, paint the underwear that you will be wearing the day that he comes back, whereupon she paints elegant lingerie on her tights with sky-blue glitter nail varnish. In this way, every voodoo variant is implemented before our eyes. Also decorated apples are deployed, as well as feathers and flames. Yuen decorates sorrow, to reverse the loss.

Juanita (2010) goes considerably further. In this film, Death stalks around, as a cat (played by Yuen), but also via letters to an uncle who died young, memories of a (grand)mother, and in visions of future farewells. Yuen appropriates her mother’s biography in the form of the deceased domestic pet, and during a trip to the coast where her mother expects to reside after passing away. She explores the area with a melancholy that is tangible in the landscape and which multiplies in the glimmering of the sun on the ocean.

When she ultimately gives herself as prey to the elements, she not only surrenders to the cycle of nature but also to the cycle of art. In her embrace of the sea, there is a recollection of Vito Acconci, who wrote out his performances in the seventies, including the instruction to lie on the floodline on the beach and to allow the body to roll back and forward in the waves. What he did in small waves on sand, Yuen is now doing on a large scale on the rocks. She is playing a game with time, art and life: sensual and grand.

Wilma Sütö

Juli 2011