Artist Talk: Jorge Ariel Escobar and Yuge Zhou
600 S. Michigan Ave. – Museum of Contemporary PhotographyAbout The Event
Join exhibiting artists Jorge Ariel Escobar and Yuge Zhou for a ‘gallery walk’ at MoCP as they discuss their artistic practices and take audience questions beside their respective artworks.
Artists’ bios:
Jorge Ariel Escobar is a queer/Latinx image-maker who holds an MFA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he was an Ed-GRS Graduate Fellow. His work focuses on themes of intimacy, desires, and relationships between queer/gay men using his own experiences as the basis of his research. Primarily working with photography, his work crosses between digital, analog, and alternative processes to visualize these concepts. He has attended workshops at Penland School of Craft, Anderson Ranch Art Center, and has been an artist in residence at AZULE. As a solo artist, he has exhibited with VALET Gallery and the Jane Sandelin Gallery both in Richmond, VA. Other credits include group exhibitions at RI Center for Photographic Arts (Providence, RI), the Trout Museum of Art (Appleton, WI), the Photographic Arts Center (Denver, CO), Perspective Gallery (Evanston, IL) and the Center for Fine Art Photography (Fort Collins, CO), where his work received an Honorable Mention as part of their Center Forward 2022 exhibition.
At the age of five, Yuge Zhou (pronounced: you-guh jou) became a household name in China as the singer for a popular children’s TV series. Growing up in the second stage of China’s economic reform, Yuge witnessed a massive influx of urban migration, expansion and globalization. She moved to the U.S., from East Coast to Midwest, creating video art, immersive installations and short films that address rootedness and longing within sites of shared dreams and transient encounters amidst the rush of contemporary life.
Yuge has exhibited and screened nationally and internationally. Recent awards include Juried Award in the installation category at ArtPrize 2021, Artist Fellowship Award in Media Arts from the Illinois Arts Council and Honorary Mention in the 2020 Prix Ars Electronica in Linz, Austria. Her work has been featured in various publications such as the Hyperallergic and The Atlantic. Yuge holds a MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago as well as a Master of Science from Syracuse University.
