Luyuan Zhang is a multidisciplinary artist based in Melbourne. Born 1995 in China, moved to Melbourne, Australia since 2014.

Comedy comes from pain. Behind the deadpan performance in the video and the slapstick humor of the installation, Luyuan’s work reflects a period of time in the artist’s life of displacement.
Ah! depicts the moment of a phone dropping into a squat toilet hole, a type of toilet particularly common in many Asian and African countries. What appears to be a comedic situation turns out to be an episode of profound loss.
In this heavily digital dependent time for all human beings, losing a smartphone means way more than the square machine itself, it means losing access to the world beyond one’s physical body. And to someone like the artist, losing the smartphone means losing contact with the world they are familiar and comfortable with. Losing access to the real internet, getting put into a digital prison and losing the ability to escape. That sound when the phone falls into the hole is equivalent of hearing prison door slamming shut.
In Safe Haven, squat toilet is rather a symbol of shelter than a prison. An object transforms the space around it into an enclosed space like a bathroom, a place to take a break from surveillance.

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