The architectural surroundings in which Yuan grew up are the setting for Childhood Scenes, a stop-motion animation consisting of miniature handmade sets of the artist’s bedroom, classroom and playground reconstructed from early memories of living at the art school. Yuan draws on short, animated films he watched in China as a child, such as The Hand (1964) by Czech animator Jiří Trnka, as well as the more experimental Jan Švankmajer, to make Childhood Scenes. In this film, figurines and furniture move around rooms, sometimes accumulating in different places as if finding their original location. At one point, a figurine becomes trapped within a window of a building and disappears, as if swallowed by it.

Accompanying Childhood Scenes are 3D printed copies of the stage sets that the artist used in making his film. This technique, familiar within architectural practices, is used here to create echoes of the buildings and domestic spaces that Yuan remembers. They are ghosts of these set pieces like that of the recollected memories that the artist drew on to make Childhood Scenes.

For his new film Wild Acts: Act I, Yuan worked together with a puppeteer, who himself is well known for his involvement in children’s television in the UK in the 1980s, from a script the artist had written. Wild Acts: Act I is made up of a series of interconnected scenes featuring characterizations of the artist and his mother; people who have sighted the ‘Yěrén’, as well as artists Andrea Fraser and Julie Becker – all performed by a marionette and ‘abstracted from real life’. Here the puppet becomes a stand-in for various figures: family, witnesses, and influences that each speak to a co-dependency within relationships, whether biological, mythical, or artistic.