By: Elena Mart
Safe Trip is a short film co-created by Yuyue He and Xiya Wang. It follows a paper effigy that silently wanders through the margins of European and UK cities, carrying letters adapted from authentic 20th-century correspondence among Chinese immigrant families. This seemingly aimless journey invites viewers to reflect on histories of migration, cultural loss, and emotional inheritance, offering a space where displacement and mourning may intersect.
Traditionally burned in East Asian funerals, the effigy here is not consumed but reanimated—unspeaking and persistently present—a “cultural ghost” that resists erasure. Rather than a passive symbol, it becomes a vessel of unresolved histories, echoing theorist Ariella Azoulay’s concept of the image as a public event and political claim.
The film traverses industrial ruins and abandoned spaces, terrains reflecting the marginality of diasporic life. Letters drift without destination; the effigy, untethered, becomes a non-narrative social actor. These absences serve as the quiet endurance of migrant memory, quietly resisting grand narratives in favor of subtle, continuous presence.
With no climax or dialogue, Safe Trip invites viewers to slow down and witness what Nicolas Bourriaud describes as “shared structures of being.” The ritual here is not explained but enacted: dislocated, yet emotionally coherent. The viewer is not merely a passive observer but participates in a ceremony of delay, grief, and resistance.
Photo Courtesy: Yuyue He
Screenshot from Safe Trip.
Another work by Yuyue, Lions, Lies, and Love, turns inward. It centers on the question: “If I had nothing, would you still love me?”—an almost naïve yet deeply resonant inquiry into intimacy, social expectation, and emotional survival. Through interviews with family, friends, and young artists—often in regional dialects—the film returns to local, embodied experience. Here, language is unpolished and specific, grounded in everyday textures and unfiltered emotion.
Photo Courtesy: Yuyue He
Screenshot from Lion, Lies and Love
Unlike symbolic abstraction, the work embraces emotional rawness. “Lions” suggests a primal longing to be understood; “lies” gestures toward the complexity of language and silence; and “love” persists as a fragile yet enduring force. The film is full of ruptures and ambiguities, but these are not weaknesses—they are where truth emerges.
This film also reflects Yuyue’s shift from personal narrative to broader communal dialogue. Using a “wandering” interview approach, she creates ethical spaces of expression without coercion. In her lens, the act of speaking becomes a site of cultural reflection and emotional generation.
While Safe Trip uses visual silence to mark mourning and migration, Lions, Lies, and Love speaks directly to the gaps in language where contemporary emotional trials unfold. It reflects how the younger generation—post-pandemic and amid generational change—adjusts their understanding of care, responsibility, and love. Mourning here is no longer spatial, but verbal and relational.
Yuyue does not seek to resolve cultural rupture. Instead, she acknowledges it as a generative state. Through her restrained, empathetic lens, she holds the fragments of diasporic life tenderly, not to resolve, but to witness.
Ultimately, Yuyue He’s creative ethos lies in using personal narrative as an entry into collective memory. Her practice cultivates a critical yet intimate mode of seeing—one that embraces vulnerability without spectacle. To view her work is to engage with the unfinished: emotional truths still breathing, still unfolding.
