Ruohan Yu

My practice-based research re-examines the materiality of painting through its role in the perception, transformation, and reconstruction of space. Through a series of site-responsive painting practices, I explore how painting can be understood as a sensual object that can be both perceived and experienced—within processes of spatial transformation My research also investigates how an autoethnographic embodiment of translocation, involving my lived experience of moving across cultural and geographical contexts, reshapes the perception of space and participates in painting as an act of building. In dialogue with artists engaged in the transformation of space during the 1980s debates on “painting in the expanded field,” I ask how painting might move beyond representation to become an object in itself. Key research areas include Object-Oriented Ontology, translocation and spatial experience, site-responsive painting, and sensual geography.