AUTOMATIC GALLERY
Yuge Zhou (周雨歌) is a Chinese-born, Chicago-based video artist and filmmaker whose work addresses rootedness, coexistence, and social encounters across urban spaces - the sites of our shared dreams. Through intimate documentation and video collage, she seeks to reveal broader truths about who we are and what it means to cohabit as a fractured collective.
At the age of five, Yuge became a household name in China as the singer for several popular children’s TV series. Growing up in Beijing during the second stage of China’s economic reform, she witnessed mass migration and the rapid expansion of her hometown — experiences that continue to shape her reflections on movement and belonging across cultures and geographies. Nearly two decades ago, she moved to the United States to study computer science and later transitioned to video art and film, earning her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally in prominent art venues and public spaces, most recently across 95 billboards in New York City’s Times Square as part of the “Midnight Moment” program. Yuge’s practice has been featured in New York Magazine, Hyperallergic, and Frieze, and her works are held in the collections of the Museum of Contemporary Photography (Chicago) and the Carl & Marilynn Thoma Foundation. She is the recipient of the 2024 Joyce Foundation Artadia Award and the 2021 Artist Fellowship Award in Media Arts from the Illinois Arts Council.
In addition to her art practice, she also directs and curates the 3300-square foot 150 Media Stream, a uniquely-structured public digital art installation in Chicago. In this capacity, she has worked with over fifty media artists and cultural institutions to create innovative programming that engages a cross section of diverse communities.