" 'Public Space' are reconstructions of old public toilets that have been built over the past thirty years following China’s ‘Open Door’ policy. In the exploration of private and public spaces, I identified the public toilet as a model of coherent design and an orchestration of rectangles, squares and straight lines. The design is abstract but at the same time there is a clear functional purpose. I have appropriated their structures and proportions in the creation of my own spaces. The constructs are independent, fragile and functionless, they do not append to any walls in the interior space. They are private yet exposed. 

In “Berlin Childhood Around 1900” by the German philosopher Walter Benjamin, he constructs a unique concept of memory guided by his thoughts on “the activation of activist memory”, here involuntary memory and "conscious memory" operate to place events and objects in a wider context of time and space. In Benjamin's own words, "it is in the profound activity of recollection that one advances step by step." When memories arise "involuntarily" as a result of an individual’s emotional reflection, they become conscious, and are significant in their manifestation, however the string of fragmented memories are not the entire source of an individual’s memory. In this process Benjamin does not seek to return to the past, but desires to understand it and therefore by placing events and objects dramatically on the stage, he compresses the past into a vacuum and provides a structure that helps us foresee the future. I have adopted this literary approach to create “Public Space”."

Yu Ji