Yunfei Ren
at The Guardhouse
Main Entrance, Fort Mason Center for Arts & Culture
March 23 - June 9, 2024
FOR-SITE is honored to present Yunfei Ren at The Guardhouse as part of The Guardhouse Program, which is designed to serve three artists annually, each of whom will create a temporary art installation inside a historic, former military guard station at the main entrance to Fort Mason Center for Arts & Culture. This program activating The Guardhouse is free and open to the public, viewable through the windows 24 hours a day.
With this installation, Bay Area-based artist Yunfei Ren (b. 1987, Wuhan, China) creates a “portal” between the past and present, commemorating the more than 300,000 Chinese immigrants who endured the weeks-long steamship voyage from southern China to San Francisco during the California Gold Rush (1848-1855) up until the U.S. Congress enacted the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, when Chinese laborers were banned from entering on the basis of racial identity. Situated on the waterfront with views of Angel Island, the artist’s installation further reminds us of the estimated several hundred thousand Chinese, Japanese, and other immigrants who between 1910 and 1940 came through the Angel Island Immigration Station, where detainment and harsh, humiliating conditions interfered with perhaps more hopeful pursuits of the “American Dream.”
Photo by Yunfei Ren
Titled Prevailing Winds, this new work inside The Guardhouse hints at forces that bear on human migratory patterns from throughout history, as well as Ren’s personal experience with transpacific migration. Gold foil-embellished Joss papers—symbolic of paper money and traditionally burned as ancestral offerings in Chinese culture—flutter against the forced air of an oscillating fan reminiscent of one that cooled the artist’s childhood home. Ren speaks of “mirrors reflecting history” when unorthodoxly utilizing Joss papers. Bouncing a colorful array, he pays tribute to the earliest Chinese immigrants who entered the Golden Gate for the prospect of mining gold, ultimately building tunnels and railroads, creating lasting infrastructure in the American West. Arranged in a grid designed by the artist to evoke longitudinal and latitudinal lines on a flat map, how might gilded ‘banknotes’ make amends for the contributions, and the backbone, of generations of immigrants?
Ren’s installation is accompanied by a seven-minute, two-channel recording, Sounds of the Boundless Ocean (2023), which debuted at the Coulter Gallery at Stanford University. At The Guardhouse, visitors can listen as this sonic component to the artist’s installation plays faintly on loop. This edited recording is also available for online listening:
The installation is free and open to the public, viewable through the windows 24 hours a day.
The Guardhouse is located at the main entrance of Fort Mason Center.
About the Artist
Yunfei Ren first came to the United States for undergraduate school in Vermont before leaving again to live abroad in Europe. He moved to San Francisco prior to the pandemic. Once here, he decided to discontinue working in fashion photography, turning his focus towards a career in the visual arts further solidified by his pursuit of an MFA at Stanford University. Working in sculpture, installation, photography, and sound, Ren’s art practice centers on the immigrant experience, exploring ideas about displacement, racial identity, and belonging in the context of history, citizenship, and queerness.
Yunfei Ren at The Guardhouse is presented by FOR-SITE in partnership with Fort Mason Center for Arts & Culture. The Guardhouse Program is made possible thanks to generous support from the ARB Fund.