The Architecture of Everyday Systems
Yucen Liu is a London-based artist and researcher whose multidisciplinary practice encompasses installation, sculpture, moving image and system-based experimentation. Working within the field of Creative Research and Development, he examines the relationship between digital assets, technological protocols and the mechanisms through which contemporary life is monitored, maintained and organised. His practice draws upon medical technologies, computational infrastructures and algorithmic governance, approaching survival not simply as a biological condition, but as something increasingly managed through institutional systems and executable processes. Liu currently lives and works in London and is studying at the University of the Arts London.
Presented at Collective Art Gallery, Unit of Living brings these concerns into the recognisable territory of everyday experience. Timetables, transport signs, administrative forms, computer folders, browser windows, weather applications and measuring instruments are among the visual structures through which contemporary life becomes navigable. They promise clarity, yet they also determine how time, movement and behaviour are categorised. Liu’s exhibition asks what happens when these systems cease merely to communicate information and begin to shape the limits of what can be understood.
The exhibition’s strength lies in its ability to make familiar symbols appear suddenly unfamiliar. Digital interfaces ordinarily disappear behind their usefulness. We click, scroll, search, save and delete without giving sustained attention to the icons facilitating these actions. Liu interrupts this fluency by extracting symbols from their functional environments and translating them into objects, surfaces and installations. Removed from the screen, an icon no longer performs an immediate task. It becomes an image to be examined and, potentially, an emblem of authority.
This transformation is especially effective in Liu’s E-Ware works, in which fragments of Google, Gmail, Microsoft Word and mobile applications are combined with blue-and-white porcelain imagery. The series brings together two systems of circulation: the historical movement of porcelain through international trade and the contemporary transmission of digital information. In Liu’s description of the series, the porcelain pattern behaves almost like an infection, spreading across and disrupting the clean surfaces of the interface.
Within the gallery, these works expand beyond the scale of the handheld device. Large translucent sheets printed with overlapping inboxes, spreadsheets, floral patterns and weather information hang from the ceiling, partially obscuring one another. The installation resembles a series of suspended screens, but its softness, transparency and physical movement prevent it from behaving like conventional technology. Visitors must navigate between the layers, encountering digital information as an unstable spatial environment rather than a flat and obedient display.
The domestic blue-and-white decoration is significant. Associated with ceramics, collecting and the decorative interior, it introduces historical memory into interfaces designed to appear perpetually current. The distinction between ornament and information begins to collapse. Floral borders invade browser windows, while email lists and weather forecasts become decorative patterns in their own right. What initially appears visually playful gradually reveals a more unsettling implication: the interfaces through which we manage our lives have themselves become a form of interior architecture.
Liu’s Googleware condenses this collision into a smaller wall-mounted object. The familiar search page is bordered and partially overtaken by floral porcelain fragments. Google’s central search bar remains visible, yet the object no longer appears wholly functional. It resembles an artefact recovered from an imagined archaeological site, one in which the defining remnants of our civilisation are not monuments or manuscripts, but search engines, inboxes and software menus.
This archaeological sensibility recurs throughout Liu’s wider practice. In Jade UI Archive, he translates digital commands such as Enter, Delete, Folder, Bluetooth and the mouse cursor into jade reliefs. The instantaneous action of clicking or connecting is placed against the much slower temporalities of geology, craft and cultural inheritance. Jade, traditionally associated with value, order and memory, gives physical permanence to commands that would ordinarily leave no material trace.
A related shift occurs in the exhibition’s ruler-based works. Familiar instruments of measurement are presented in recognisable forms, but their conventional markings are replaced by QR codes, dates, times and recorded events. Liu preserves the appearance of functional precision while removing the possibility of straightforward human interpretation. A ruler still promises order, but what it measures is no longer stable.
Historically, rulers and calibrated instruments have helped construct the idea that space can be divided into universal, objective units. Liu’s QR Instruments replace these increments with machine-readable data. Their units cannot be interpreted by the eye alone, suggesting a transfer of authority from human perception to technological mediation. The viewer recognises the tool but is unable to use it in the expected way. Measurement becomes a conceptual rather than practical act.
This disruption is central to Unit of Living. Liu does not reject systems or suggest that contemporary life can exist without them. Instead, he exposes their constructed nature. Centimetres, calendars, notification counts and digital folders are not neutral descriptions of reality. They are frameworks that decide what can be recorded, compared and retrieved. Anything that cannot be translated into the appropriate unit risks becoming invisible.
One installation extends this enquiry through a continuous stream of personal photographs arranged in long vertical strips. Images of meals, transport, architecture, screens and daily encounters descend from wall-mounted structures, pass over white plinths and gather across the floor. The photographs resemble an analogue social-media feed or an endless roll of camera images given physical form.
Presented at this scale, the archive feels both intimate and impersonal. Each photograph records a particular moment, but repetition reduces individual experiences to units within a larger sequence. The images appear to measure a life through accumulation. They also reveal the tension between remembering an event and simply storing evidence that it occurred. The structure evokes the endlessness of digital archives, in which personal memory is increasingly outsourced to devices and cloud-based systems.
Elsewhere, a staged dining table introduces a more theatrical meditation on sustenance and measurement. Two places are set beneath a monitor displaying an animation of candles, while lit candles surround the table and occupy the floor. The installation creates an atmosphere that initially suggests hospitality, intimacy or ritual. Yet the screen transforms the candle from a symbolic source of warmth into a regulated interface through which energy, consumption and duration can be calculated.
This idea connects to Liu’s Candle System, a speculative project in which candles are numbered, classified and standardised as devices for managing energy intake. Heat becomes nutrition, combustion becomes ingestion, and time becomes a unit of output. The language of medical devices, industrial manuals and food engineering is applied to one of humanity’s most elementary objects.
Within Unit of Living, this clinical logic is softened by tablecloths, crockery and glasses, but it is never fully domesticated. The burning candles are beautiful, yet they also function as timers. Their gradual consumption marks the passage of time more visibly than a digital clock, making energy loss tangible. Liu contrasts the apparent accuracy of technological systems with the unstable physicality of wax, flame and bodily appetite.
The exhibition repeatedly moves between seduction and unease. Its pale surfaces, translucent fabrics, floral motifs and restrained presentation produce an atmosphere of delicacy. This visual lightness prevents the work from becoming didactic, but it also mirrors the unobtrusive appearance of the systems being examined. Digital governance rarely presents itself as coercive. It arrives through attractive interfaces, convenient applications and seemingly helpful reminders.
At times, the breadth of Liu’s symbolic vocabulary risks making the exhibition feel dispersed. Search engines, porcelain, measuring tools, photographic archives and speculative nutrition systems each carry substantial conceptual weight. Some viewers may desire stronger visual connections between the individual installations. Yet this fragmentation can also be understood as an accurate reflection of contemporary experience. Daily life is not governed by one totalising interface, but by an accumulation of small systems whose authority emerges through repetition.
The title Unit of Living holds this accumulation together. A unit may be a measurement, a room, a device, an individual or a component within a larger mechanism. Liu keeps each of these meanings active. The gallery becomes both an inhabited environment and a diagram of the systems organising habitation. The individual appears not outside these structures, but embedded within them.
Ultimately, Liu’s work is most persuasive when it makes the ordinary appear historically strange. A browser window becomes porcelain. A digital command becomes jade. A ruler measures data rather than distance. A sequence of personal images becomes architectural, while a candle becomes an apparatus for regulating survival. Through these acts of displacement, Liu reveals that the visual language of contemporary life is neither inevitable nor passive.
Unit of Living does not provide an escape from the systems it examines. Instead, it creates a temporary suspension in which their assumptions can be seen. By altering the materiality, scale and context of everyday symbols, Liu invites viewers to consider not only what these systems measure, but what remains unrecorded: memory without documentation, time without productivity, experience without classification and life beyond the limits of the interface.
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Review written by Lisa Gray for The Flux Review, 2026
