Missing Mind

Yan Gu a.k.a Camille Artist Statement
Missing Mind


Our life looks like a dream that is not reality; We can easily lose ourselves in it. My project is about using illustration, photography and video to explain a dream.

I have created an enclosed environment full of my illustrations. These illustrations show the marvellous world of my dreams, and I want to welcome the audience into my dream. All the patterns in this room are linked to each other, and it is difficult to find out where it is starting and where it is the ending, just like people’s mind. The animals appearing on the wall, ceiling or floor looks like fish or bird but are spirits living in this surreal world. The individual objects, painted in white, will merge with the real and surreal, to replicate the moment in which we are in limbo between awake and asleep.

I did performance in this space; I performed my dream and while I was performing the pattern made me forget myself and I became part of the room; I dreamt myself into a butterfly - or had a butterfly dreamt to become me?
If someone wears the “dreaming cloth” in this environment, the unceasing and complex pattern will make a special relationship between the space and the person wearing it in the space.

I want to use these performances to show confusion and puzzling thoughts; I want to create a state of mind that one cannot escape, and cannot control the fluctuation between the real and surreal of our lives. I think that we feel these feelings in our conscious lives, and that’s what I want to express in this visual language.