Nina Yuen

Drawing from sources including her own memories and experiences, literature, poetry, science, and art history, Nina Yuen merges the personal and the universal in her videos. Incorporating herself into her films as protagonist and narrator, she builds dreamlike, loosely constructed scenes out of hypnotic image series that seem to unspool into snippets of music and the rhythm of her voice, as she recites poetry, reads passages from a wide range of texts, and recounts her own and other people’s memories. Though such weighty philosophical themes as death, time, and beauty run throughout her films, Yuen’s humor keeps things light, surprising, and strange.

Nina Yuen (b. 1981 in Kahuku, Hawaii) lives and works in New Haven, Connecticut. She received her BA from Harvard University (2003) and her MFA from Bard College (2014). Her work has been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, Vienna; De Appel Arts Center, Amsterdam; Chinese Arts Center, Manchester; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Portland Institute of Contemporary Art, Portland; Honolulu Museum of Art, Hawaii; Freud Museum, London; Museu de Arte Contemporanea Niteroi, Brazil; Museum het Dolhuys, Netherlands; The Stenersen Museum, Oslo; Rijksakademie, Amsterdam; Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh; Tavistock Center, London; Living Art Museum, Reykjavík, Iceland; and Kunstverein, Wiesbaden, Germany. Her films have been screened at aCinema, Milwaukee, WI; Art Film Hour, Hong Kong; Film Festival Oberhausen, Germany; Kassel Documentary Film & Video Festival, Germany; Millennium Film Journal, New York; Mumbai City Museum, India; Rotterdam Film Festival, Netherlands; San Diego Asian American Film Festival, California; and TQW Tanzquartier Wien, Austria, alongside a host of international arts and film festivals.

Gallery Exhibitions