Delta Yan Yu 闫雨

"Blueprint is a project I started during my stay at the Swatch Art Peace Hotel in Shanghai. The traditional diazo blueline paper - commonly used in architectural and engineering drawings decades ago - became my new way of identifying and documenting fragments of the urban landscapes and transitions of the city spaces. Exposing the light sensitive papers directly under the architectures, city infrastructures, random objects found in the construction sites, traces of human livings and so on, I create my “urban blueprint archive” composed of life-sized abstract blueline images in different scales and shapes, and then transform them into dimensional objects in hope of engaging with people, passage of time and our physical surroundings. 

For these two pieces, I used this old-fashioned technique to interact with the Swatch Art Peace Hotel, a spot mixed with the old and the new, ephemerality and eternity, present and absent during the pandemic time. I spent a lot of time observing the details of the hotel’s interior as well as the daily traces left by other artists in the residency, including the vase with plants, shelf of the induction cooker, the outline of the sofa in the lounge, bookcase, sunlight shadowed on the third-floor stairs, etc. These abstract shapes and images, actually my memories during the residency at Swatch, are permanently preserved in the chemical process of blue." (Delta Yan Yu, 2021)