At the Vitamin Creative Space, in 2007 Freize Art Fair, there was only one Chinese gallery, Guangzhou, that showed among others artworks by Chu Yun, an artist based in Shenzhen, South China. His ‘Constellation’ is an installation consisting of daily household electric appliances. The viewer enters a dark room in which sparkling stars turn out to be indicator lights of the former appliances, once the audience sight adapts to the darkness. When put together, these lights form a world of their own and start to emit communication signals. Chu Yun’s art always seeks to approach invisible forces in everyday life and discloses them. As the 17th Century Dutch philosopher Spinoza believed there is a deterministic universe where "All things in nature proceed from certain necessity and with the utmost perfection." Therefore, nothing happens by chance in Spinoza's world, and reason does not work in terms of contingency - reality is perfection. Today, Spinoza’s interest in the world order of geometric forms reminds us how closely the artificiality of our knowledge corresponds to the world one. Interestingly, his philosophy also evokes a counterforce: contingency, which is exactly the driving force behind our rational observation. Therefore, what Chu Yun attempts to experiment in his artwork is how an individual could find himself surrounded by contingency and the artificial driving forces of his own tracks.
Valentina Culatti