Tutu Gallery presents Verb List, Cherrie Yu’s first solo exhibition in New York a video installation, opening October 4 through November 1, 2025. Verb List gathers found footage materials in proximity to Chinese and Chinese diasporic representations, sourcing from contemporary films, early cinema, documentaries, television series and internet videos. The installation formally experiments with projection screens of handmade paper and cyanotype prints, structured by native plants including smilax vines foraged from residency sites in Massachusetts and New Hampshire, and found semi-transparent industrial materials like window partitions and roofing ventilation nets.

Yu collected the first verb 背 (carry) from the 1998 China Television Production Center adaptation of the novel Water Margins. In this scene, the bandit Li Kui carries on his back his elderly mother, oblivious that she is soon to be devoured by tigers in his momentary absence. The act seems at odds with the burglar’s usual modes of operation, and literary scholars have arrived at no consensus on this chapter — some say it is a baffling digression from the previous and following chapters, while others read it as a karmic punishment of the mother’s bad parenting. Removed from the service for narrative cohesion, this mundane gesture becomes a singular presence in Yu’s eyes, prompting her subsequent accumulation of domestic actions, physical stunts, mundane labor and bizarre gestures. For example, in 1963’s Love Eterne, students sit square legged and sway gently from left to right as they recite poetry; in Ang Lee’s 1994 East, Drink, Man, Woman, a father blows into the mouth a duck to separate its flesh from skin; people, mostly women, wring out towels; individuals hold their faces in moments of despair or exhaustion; triad members fly horizontally into the passenger seat to dodge bullets.

Loosely nodding to Richard Serra’s 1967 drawing Verb List, which Serra described as a compilation of “actions to relate to oneself, material, place, and process”, Yu’s Verb List rather reflects a more abstracted collective form emerging from moving lights and shadows. Amongst the over 300 clips of verbs, one might recognize familiar faces of international stars, such as Chow Yun-Fat, lighting a cigar as King Mongkut in the 1999 American period drama film Anna and the King, or Anna May Wong, kissing a photograph passionately in the 1922 silent film The Toll of the Sea. These actions are arranged and edited side by side with legible gestures of extras, background actors, and passersby, forming a tableau that accentuates the essence of gestures, rendering the actants almost anonymous. Freed from the narrative timelines where they were culled from, this collection of verbs weave into a new landscape of temporal autonomy.

Conceptualizing video installation as a collage and printmaking process, Yu approaches the question of representation not through identity politics, but identity poetics. Inside the installation, verbs become pockets of light captured through thin materials of paper and mesh, forming luminescent screens partitioning the gallery space. With ambiguous familiarity, the gestures peel away at each other, tracing each other’s boundaries, becoming transparent in each other’s company. Together they beckon towards Spinoza’s question, “what can a body do?” while refusing a finite, opaque answer.

(contact the gallery for the exact address and to schedule a visit)