2000
Video (Pal DV) 4:3, Sound | English | Chinese restaurant ceiling installation | table, chairs

coming home—daily structures of life was produced while I was artist in residency (MAK Schindler Scholarship) in Los Angeles in 1999/2000. The video is composed of scenes from Hollywood films depicting Chinese restaurants and Chinatowns in New York and Los Angeles. The scenes were taken from films including: Big Trouble in Little China, The Year of the Dragon, Rush Hour, Mickey Blue Eyes, eXistenZ, Waiting for Guffman, Eat Drink Man Woman.
These scenes are grouped: the first group comprises neon light advertisings of Chinese restaurants, establishing shots of the restaurants from outside, then the camera moves to the inside, to the second group. With this, I keep to a vague narration going into a restaurant and then out again. In between these scenes the screen is black, while my own voice tells the story of my family’s emigration to Austria and our Chinese restaurant. Certainly, Los Angeles with its immigration history and its Chinatown was an ideal backdrop to develop such a work.
The work was shown first in the apartment where I stayed—the Mackey Apartments built by Rudolf Schindler, an Austrian architect who immigrated to the US in the 1910s. My installation paid tribute to Schindler’s architecture and how he defined spaces by working with different ceiling heights. In my case, I hang parts of a Chinese restaurant ceiling underneath Schindler’s; beneath that I placed a table with a TV set playing the video coming home—daily structures of life. The ceiling itself is made of original parts of a Chinese restaurant my parents owned in the 1980s: a ceiling construction made of golden dragons and phoenixes on a blue, white and red background. This is one of the motifs that was significant for Chinese restaurants at that time.
The installation included two other works: korean new year, a text piece that made use of a Korean New Year’s calendar. It was on display in the kitchen of the Mackey apartment, along with another work above the dining table called i don’t go to the chinese supermarket. After the installation in Los Angeles, coming home—daily structures of life was shipped back in time for my graduation show at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. (JY)

Exhibition list:
2015 Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Taipei (TW)
2009 Work in Progress: How Do Artists Work?, Iberia Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing (CN)
2002 MAC – Musée d’Art Contemporain, Marseille (F)
2002 Werkleitz Biennale, Werkleitz (DE)
2001 Jun Yang “Coming Home. Daily Structures of Life – Version D00“, GfZK – Museum of Contemporary Art, Leipzig (DE)
2001 MAK – Museum für angewandte Kunst, Galerie, Vienna (AT)
2001 in the meantime…, De Appel Foundation, Amsterdam (NL)
2000 Kunstverein Wolfsburg, Wolfsburg (DE)
2000 Encounter, Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery, Tokyo (JP)
2000 Import Export, Salzburger Kunstverein, Salzburg (AT); Museum Moderner Kunst, Arnheim (NL)
2000 If I was in LA, MAK Center for Art and Architecture, Los Angeles (US)