Filmmaker and Performance Artist Cherrie Yu Has Wrestled in the Middle of Traffic for Their Art
Cherrie Yu at the Work Center. Photo by Michael Cestaro.
Featured in Introducing CULTURED’s 2025 Young Artists List via CULTURED Mag
If Cherrie Yu sees you moving out in the world and likes what they see, they might just ask you to collaborate. The visual arts fellow- who grew up in Xi’an and Wuxi, China- makes videos, performances, and prints that explore the relationship between everyday movement, dance, labor, and play. In Trisha and Homer, 2018, they juxtapose a 1986 solo by choreographer Trisha Brown with the movement of a mopping maintenance worker named Homero Muñoz. Their recent work places the balletic, athletic, and highly specialized subcultures of ping-pong players and dancers side-by-side.
Tell us about a teacher who changed the way you think about art.
My friend and mentor Bryan Saner. Bryan was not my teacher at the Art Institute of Chicago, but I was introduced to him through my teachers Lin Hixson and Matthew Goulish. Bryan is an amazing woodworker, sculptor, performer, and dancer, and I did an apprenticeship with him for a number of years when I lived in Chicago. He taught me so much about the laboring body as the dancing body—not through lecturing but through working alongside him and observing how he moved through the world and alongside objects and materials. I have such fond memories of us doing things together, like caning an old chair, setting bathroom tiles, putting in floorboards, or washing out window screens at a Frank Lloyd Wright house in Oak Park. You might say, “Oh Cherrie, that’s so different from the work you do now.” But I really believe that the things on the periphery of what we do as artists are the things that mold us.
Describe one work you’ve made that captures who you are as an artist.
In 2017 when I started grad school I made my first piece of video art called Wrestling Study. I thought of it as a performance for the camera and an experiment at the same time—a friend and I learned to reenact 30 seconds of a wrestling match in the moving traffic on Michigan Avenue in Chicago. I always think of it as a sort of key that opened up a lot of possibilities for projects to come, and I often return to it as an idea, a building block, or a tool in my repertoire and history of thinking.
What’s an underrated studio tool you can’t live without?
I have been really obsessed with saving all my coffee-cup sleeves since 2022. I have a box of them in my studio. I used them for a number of things, and I kept finding new uses for them. I had to make masks for characters for a performance in 2023, and I used them as a part of the masks because it was very sturdy and also flexible and soft. I recently used them as a part of the paste-paper process for bookmaking. In general, I am obsessed with cardboard texture materials.
See CULTURED’s full 2025 Young Artists list and access other individual artist profiles here.
Photo by Ruoxin Sun
About the artist:
Cherrie Yu (Visual Arts Fellow 2024-2025) was born in Xi’an, China in 1995. She has been living and working in the US since 2013. Her films and performances have shown at Chicago Cultural Center, the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Roman Susan Gallery, Gallery 400, Stove Works, Prismatic Ground Film Festival, Essex Flowers Gallery, Wassaic Project, Movement Research at Judson Church, Center for Performance Research, Pageant Space, ICA Maine, the David Ireland House , Kala Art Institute , Contemporary Calgary Museum, Mint Museum, etc.
She has been an artist in residence at Fine Arts Work Center, Anderson Center at Tower view, ACRE, Contemporary Calgary Museum, Monson Arts, Yaddo, McColl Center, and Sharpe Walentas Studio Program. She was an awardee of the Kala Art Institute Media Award Fellowship in 2022, and a 2024 Movement Research Van Lier Emerging Artist of Color Fellow. She has been a visiting artist at Emory Universit’s anthropology department, and a visiting teaching artist at the Visual Art department at UNC Charlotte.
