Yuan Zhongyu (b. 1994, Jiading, Shanghai) is an artist and one of the initiators of Third Street Gallery. He lives and works in Shanghai. Yuan’s practice explores the ambiguous spatial relationship between individuals and their environments, engaging with the conditions of modernization and the absurdity embedded in its landscapes. Reflecting on the limitations of the monument as a form, he reconfigures misalignments of identity, misreadings between subject and object, and fragments of everyday life into works that function as monuments to memory. His recent projects focus on the sheltering qualities of the dwelling. Through found materials, Yuan examines the sense of insecurity produced by the overlap between relative, object-based dangers and the fundamental vulnerability of existence, bringing together the coexisting emotional states of refuge and leisure.