Jiaying Yu „In Between“

In the organizer's words:

In her photographic work, Jiaying Yu explores the feelings and living conditions of young Chinese women who, like her, have come to Germany to study. She combines portraits with close-ups of their apartments.

Around 60 percent of Chinese students in Germany are women. One of them is photographer Jiaying Yu, who was born in Hunan in 1995. As part of this group, she initially took portraits of Chinese female students from her circle of friends and acquaintances and later after contact requests via social media. Jiaying Yu combines these images with photographs from the homes of the people portrayed. In doing so, she examines the emotional and living environments of the young women, who are between 18 and 30 years old and live in Essen and the surrounding area. Most of them come from middle-class families and were traditionally brought up to be respectful, reserved and modest.

With its individual and social freedoms, the new life in the West is very challenging for the young women and creates ambivalent feelings in many of them. Photographer Jiaying Yu also experienced this and made it the subject of her photographs. The portraits, which she photographed in 6 x 6 medium format, convey moods of loneliness and sadness and yet reflect the strength of the young women under the new living conditions. The small-format photographs of the apartments, on the other hand, appear cold and impersonal, as if the rooms were only furnished for a short stay and their inhabitants were on the move. But on the move to where? The pictures create the feeling of "In Between" - in between: between East and West, between restraint and freedom, between youth and adulthood.

"In Between" is an exhibition by the Zollverein Foundation in cooperation with Pixelprojekt_Ruhrgebiet and the Ruhr Museum, supported by the RAG-Stiftung and the Gesellschaft der Freunde und Förderer der Stiftung Zollverein e.V.

Jiaying Yu

Jiaying Yu comes from a Chinese engineering family and studied Material Science and Engineering in Changsha from 2014 to 2018. Her interest in art and photography was sparked when she met a fashion photographer. From 2019 to 2023 she studied photography at the Folkwang University of the Arts in Essen (Bachelor) and since 2023 at the FH Dortmund (Master).

Current photography in the Ruhr area. Pixelprojekt at Zollverein

The Pixelprojekt_Ruhrgebiet was developed in 2002 by photographer Peter Liedtke and founded in 2003 on the initiative of 26 freelance photographers at the time. It is a non-commercial project that collects and structures outstanding photographic series on individual aspects of the Ruhr region and makes them visible on a website. A jury decides on the newly included series. The more than 10,000 images in the collection are dedicated to topics such as ecology, social issues, culture, the city, housing, sport, economic change and, above all, the people in the Ruhr region. The joint exhibition series "Current Photography in the Ruhr Area. Pixelprojekt auf Zollverein" by the Zollverein Foundation and the Pixelprojekt_Ruhrgebiet focuses on contemporary positions and Ruhr area themes in the broadest sense.

Price information:

Adults: €3 Children and young people under 18, schoolchildren and students under 25: free