The first exhibition of Photographic Centre Peri’s exhibition programme of 2023!
Four Women started in 2019, two years after my great-grandmother died. At that time, I started to go back to her house; where she used to live, and where we used to live together, to rediscover her stories. Giving life back to my grandmother’s past, rediscovering the stories of the women in my family I grew up with before they even became mothers and grandmothers –captivated by who they are and were as individuals.
Grown-up in China, I was taught that individuals subscribe to collective values, but brought up by three generations of women in my family, I found each woman has a rich and abundant life outside of their assigned roles by society. All this led me to see and understand myself through their eyes and through my images of them. All four of us, through one another, have undergone 100 years of fast-paced changes in China. We have all been changed and engulfed by the times. My great-grandmother, my grandmother, and my mother never once dared claim they were feminists; still, embedded in me since my birth-given unisex name, how they raised me is who they’ve made me –a feminist, an artist.
Yujie Zhou (b. 1997, China) is a visual artist working with photography as her primary medium. Through performativity and a decoded notion of language, her practice seeks to interrogate dominant historical narratives and power structures while reframing a collective individuality. She is currently undertaking her Master of Arts in Photography at Aalto University, Finland. Yujie’s work has been shown internationally in institutions such as Luxelakes.A4 Art Museum in China, BFoto Festival in Spain, and will be showcased at the Finnish Museum of Photography in 2023.
