PARADOXE
PARADOXE invites the viewer into a virtual environment where perception itself becomes unstable. Equipped with Oculus technology, players enter a 360° space that isolates them from the tangible world, immersing them in a cybernetic reality.
From the simplicity of children’s building blocks arises a monumental landscape: vast structures, illuminated by an unforgivingly cold light, dominate the scene. Within this artificial territory, visitors are free to move, shift the blocks, and explore an environment that is at once playful and unsettling.
The work questions the paradox of our time: as visual technologies expand our horizons, they also disrupt our relationship to reality. What remains real when immersion itself becomes the norm?
Artist
Xilun YOU
Xilun YOU is a Chinese artist currently based in London. Working across video, photography, installation, and performance, her practice explores themes of identity, migration, space, and power—investigating how individuals navigate the entanglements of globalization and historical narrative.
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Her work often repurposes found footage, online materials, and everyday objects to construct new narrative structures and metaphorical spaces. In Blonde Lin, YOU collages scenes from Chinese cinema with personal video archives to fabricate a fictional identity rooted in the migration history between Hong Kong and Shanghai during the 1980s and 1990s, addressing the complexities and dislocations of identity in the context of global migration. Control Game reassembles internet-sourced imagery to juxtapose idealized architectural utopias with their real-world collapse, interrogating the psychological control mechanisms embedded in contemporary mass media. Menkan (Threshold) draws from the architectural element of the traditional Chinese door sill, placing a red wooden block at the entrance of a French city hall to evoke the invisible boundary between public and political space. In Origin of the World, a red paper boat is embedded within the cracks of an ancient structure—combining Chinese poetry with Mediterranean migration realities to poetically express the tensions between displacement, nostalgia, and cultural identity.
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YOU’s practice consistently engages with the friction between personal experience and social structure. Through a multidisciplinary approach and a visual language that is both minimal and symbolically rich, she invites viewers to reconsider the boundaries and fluidities of “home,” “identity,” and “power.”