Project page · PACT Zollverein residencies, January–July 2027

Who May Rewrite a Memory?

An installation for three screens and a table, about a fictional bedroom that visitors change by drawing on a print.

Haorui Yu · Haitian Liu · Qiufeng Yi · Ziyue Yang

A dark hall with three screens in a row showing the bedroom, a worktable with a print and pens, and two pale figures.
Mock-upThree screens and a table. The hall is a digital mock-up, not PACT's space.

The work

›Who May Rewrite a Memory?‹ is an installation about a fictional bedroom in the Ruhr, which visitors change by drawing on a printed picture of it. The room exists only as a 3D model, and every picture of it is made from that model. Three screens hang above a worktable: the current picture of the room on the left, a film of about 140 seconds with music in the centre, and on the right a view from above the table that shows only paper and hands. In the film a curtain moves, tea is poured and a page is turned, and only a hand is ever seen. Visitors draw with three pens, blue to delete an object, red to change or add one and green to move one, and their marks stay anonymous. After each visitor we choose one mark, change the room in 3D and print a new picture for the next person. The film plays on until its new version is ready. Every change is accepted as if it had always been there, and the work is about how a memory is rewritten when nobody objects.

Five pictures

A small bedroom seen from the doorway: a round table with a lamp, teapot, two cups and an open album, a chair with a knitted blanket, a bed, a window onto rooftops and a pithead.
1 · The room. This bedroom is fictional. It exists as a 3D model, and every picture of it is made from that model. First frame of example film 1.
White model of the installation with six numbered labels: left screen, centre screen, right screen, camera above the table, table with the printed picture and three pens, printer and laptop.
Diagram2 · The installation. Left screen: the current picture of the room. Centre screen: the film. Right screen: what the camera above the table sees. On the table: the printed picture and three pens. Beside it, a printer and a laptop that holds the room in 3D.
Top view of a print of the bedroom on a wooden table: a red ring around the lamp, a blue cross on a cup, a green arrow from the chair; a green pen in use, a red and a blue pen beside the print.
Illustration3 · At the table. A visitor draws on the print. Blue deletes, red changes or adds, green moves. This is what the camera above the table sees; it is shown on the right screen.
Plain grey-and-tan 3D render of the round table: two cups, a teapot spout, an open book.
3D model
The same view as a finished picture: a steaming cup of tea, an empty cup, a teapot spout and an old album on a worn wooden table.
New picture
4 · From 3D model to new picture. Every new picture is made to follow the 3D model, object by object.
The bedroom from the doorway, before a change.
Before
The same view after a change, with the album page and the blanket on the chair outlined in yellow.
After
5 · Only the outlined part is new. Only the part that changed is made again, so the rest of the room stays exactly as it was.

Where it stands

So far we have made a first example film and tested each step on its own. At PACT the whole loop would run for the first time, with visitors.

Team and selected work

Haorui Yu

Artist, project lead — the rounds and the 3D room

Installation, performance and moving image. Trained at the School of Experimental Art, Tianjin Academy of Fine Arts.

Relations: a photographic image transferred onto a square panel of mirror-finish rippled steel.
Relations (2023). Transfer print on mirror-finish rippled steel; installation. MFA graduation exhibition, Tianjin Academy of Fine Arts.

More work: yha9806.github.io

Haitian Liu

Artist — concept, film and sound

Film, installation and everyday objects.

Pale, rippling patterns of light on a dark surface, like light passing through moving water.
Death Light (2025). Installation that turns the acceptance of death into a material encounter in a room.
A lump of ice on a white-painted plinth, a red fingerprint-shaped mark inside it and a thin pool of meltwater at its base.
For Later (2026). Moving image: a time-lapse of a home-made dumpling frozen in ice as it holds, collapses and leaves a stain. Video

Qiufeng Yi

Technical support — image generation and checks

Computer vision and image processing, University of Birmingham. For this work he makes the new pictures from the guide images of the 3D room and checks them before they are used.

Ziyue Yang

Artist — visual advice

Art and design, Tianjin Academy of Fine Arts; member of the collective Miyun Yizhi.

A room of black columns shaped like standing figures, some topped with white foam.
A Prayer That the Fragrance of Health May Ever Spill Through Your Breast (2021). Miyun Yizhi: Feng Tai, Tang Shanshan, Wang Wanting, Ziyue Yang, Haorui Yu. Columns that consume themselves as they stand. Epoch, International Arts Fund, Moscow, online, 2022; ART100 Chronology, 2022.
A white wall with a floating balloon shark, a bow hung on the wall, arrows, and two armchairs below.
For a Moment the Lie Becomes Truth (2021), with Haorui Yu. Performance and installation: arrows are shot at arranged spray-paint cans while a second person films, free to choose the view. The Moon Shines Bright Among the Sparse Stars, 2021.