WORK / LIVE 干活 Yao Yuchao 姚玉超

Yao Yuchao 姚玉超 is a mechanical design engineer with more than fourteen years of experience; he worked at Bernard Controls China until 2016. Using his design software in an unconventional way, with no production in mind, he turned a poetic sentence he had come up with during a conversation first into block lettering and then into the equivalent of a bar code.

The bar code was printed in a large format and shown in several venues, among them Cache Space in Beijing’s 798 district and MCAM Ming Museum in Shanghai, with the video displayed nearby.

The work holds a sharp tension and a poetic, political humour, suspended between vernacular quotation and digital meme. Stealing time from purely productive activity, converting design software into a tool of conceptual art and reflecting with humour on existential and social pressure, Yao created a powerful artistic gesture within his daily working routine. His bittersweet sentence, “To exist is legitimate, like thieves stealing things”, has since become wall writing and stickers in many of the department’s activities.