Unseen Coordinates – Changyue Ni
Unseen Coordinates
Changyue Ni
Changyue “Claire” Niu is a visual artist working in photography and installation. She is currently completing her degrees in Art, Economics, and Mathematics at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. Originally from Beijing, China, Niu explores memory, space, and cultural identity through immersive works that blend photography with personal and historical narratives.
Her practice draws on everyday objects, childhood memories, and traditional Chinese architecture — particularly symbolic structures like the archway — to reconstruct emotional and domestic landscapes. By mimicking scenes from her past and integrating elements of Chinese cultural heritage, she creates poetic installations that ask how memory is preserved and how spaces become vessels of meaning.
Though early in her career, Niu is developing a distinct voice that bridges personal storytelling with broader cultural reflection, using photography not only as documentation, but as a tactile and spatial experience.
About the work:
In my work, I explore photography and installation as mediums to reconstruct memory and space, often drawing from personal experience and collective cultural history. I use everyday objects, photographs, and archival references to mimic scenes from childhood and traditional Chinese life, reimagining spaces that once existed — or perhaps only live on in memory. Through this process, I investigate how cultural identity, nostalgia, and personal history intersect.
My installations combine the tactile presence of lived materials with photographic imagery, creating immersive environments that collapse the boundaries between image and space, past and present. I am especially interested in architectural forms like the Chinese archway — symbolic structures that represent both transition and remembrance — as portals to both cultural tradition and intimate reflection. Growing up between eras of rapid change, I witnessed shifts in both physical landscapes and collective memory. These transformations influence how I approach photography: not simply as a tool of documentation, but as a means of evoking what is no longer visible. My work questions how memory is preserved, reconstructed, and performed. Whose histories are remembered, and whose are forgotten? What traces do we leave behind?
In a time when digital images overwhelm our sense of presence, I aim to slow down the act of looking — inviting the viewer to dwell in moments of absence, to encounter the familiar made strange, and to participate in the quiet dialogue between image, object, and space.
The installation: