Phoebe Guyuzi-Chen
- May 15
- 4 min read
Phoebe Guyuzi-Chen is an interdisciplinary artist based between Los Angeles and Chicago. She is from Shenzhen and studied sculpture at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She builds installations from materials she picks up on construction sites. Her project Folding Breath is a series of inflatable structures made from recycled plastic sheets and fans. Guyuzi-Chen started making work at 17 after she lost her aunt. Near where she grew up there were two Qing dynasty pagodas, her first real connection to her own cultural history.
Folding Breath 1,2,3 (left to right) - Installation performance, 2025
Q: Tell us a bit about yourself. How did you get into making art?
A: I work with installation and space, often thinking about how presence can be held or extended. Growing up, I was always drawn to exhibitions and museums, but art felt distant, something to look at rather than something to make.
That shifted when I was 17, after my aunt passed away. I remember being struck by how quickly someone can disappear, not only physically but from everyday conversation. It felt abrupt and unresolved. I wanted to find a way to hold onto her, or at least to resist that disappearance.
I began making a series of works using the flowers I had wanted to give her but had never been able to.
Through photography, documentary videos, prints, and sculpture, I tried to preserve something that could not be kept. That process changed how I understood making. Since then, art has become a way for me to stay with what would otherwise fade.
Q: What does it mean for you to build spaces rather than objects?
A: Space has always been central to my practice. I am drawn to how space can shape a person in ways an object cannot. When you are inside a space, you are physically within the work. Your senses are activated at once, through sight, sound, smell, and movement. This kind of engagement feels unavoidable.
I often think of a line quoted in Gaston Bachelard's The Poetics of Space: "Space has always reduced me to silence." Space, in this sense, has the ability to shift one's inner state through sensory experience rather than representation.
Walking in a space is a way of thinking through the body, where attention moves across different sensory layers. For me, making is not about composing an image, but about constructing a situation that the body can experience.
Q: How did Folding Breath come together?
A: Folding Breath began as a small experiment. I discovered that with a fan and two layers of fabric, you can create a body sustained entirely by air.
When I started thinking about materials, I looked outside my window and saw a massive plastic sheet covering an entire floor of a building under construction. It felt immediate, almost too obvious to ignore.
I spoke with a construction worker and asked what would happen to the plastic after the project. Realising how much of it would be discarded made me reconsider the scale of the work. I decided to reuse these materials and make something with them, rather than let them be buried.
I started collecting these plastics and scaling up the experiment. These small experiments evolved into a series of gigantic breathing structures shaped by airflow and became a way of thinking about breath, circulation, and the afterlife of materials within the city.
Q: Invisible Labor connects the Chinese characters for horse and mother. Can you walk us through that?
A: Yes, in Chinese, the character for horse is 馬 (pronounced mǎ) and the character for mother is 媽 (pronounced mā). When you look closely, 媽 is composed of two parts: 女, meaning woman, and 馬, meaning horse.
I became interested in this overlap, not as a linguistic fact, but as a way of thinking about labor and value. Historically, horses were essential to movement, survival, and expansion; they supported the formation of entire societies and even civilisation. Their role feels almost sacred, yet often taken for granted. This connection led me to think about how certain forms of labor are embedded within structures but rarely recognised. They are so essential to society that they form the foundation of daily life, to the point that they blend into the background and become almost invisible.
Q: Pagodas have become a real research thread for you. What keeps you digging into that form?
A: My interest in pagodas comes from a search for cultural identity. Growing up in Shenzhen, I didn't have many chances to encounter historical architecture or a sense of rooted culture. I learned history in school, but it always felt distant, something I understood intellectually but couldn't feel.
Near where I lived, there were two Qing dynasty pagodas. They were the only structures that seemed to embody culture in a tangible way. I began researching them, looking at archival images and tracing their histories. That was the first time I felt a direct connection to my own culture and history. It has been unstoppable since then. It opened a door for me to begin understanding the land I grew up in, and that process keeps unfolding.
Q: You're between LA and Chicago. What are you working on right now?
A: Currently, I am continuing the ideas from Folding Breath, trying to push the work into a next phase. Through that project, I became more aware of the scale of plastic waste, especially within construction sites. It made me question what it means to work with these materials beyond a single installation.
I realized that a one-time project does very little in terms of actual recycling. What I am interested in now is building a system rather than a single work, something that can continuously collect, reuse, and circulate these materials.
I am still in the process of testing what that might look like, whether through collaborations, site-based interventions, or a more structured network. The goal is not to solve the problem entirely, but to create a model that can shift how these materials are perceived and reused.
