The global pandemic reconfigured the lives of millions, severing familial bonds, grounding international travel, and cloistering artists far from home. Among them was Chinese-born, U.S.-based artist Yuge Zhou, whose creative journey during this period evolved into an evocative and meditative practice rooted in memory, mythology, and longing. While many sought refuge indoors, Zhou found artistic transcendence under the open night sky. Her project, Moon Drawings, delicately etched into snowy parking lots and lakeside sand with the help of a rolling suitcase, became both a visual metaphor and a personal pilgrimage.
The work emerged as an extension of an earlier, interrupted video series titled Where The East of The Day Meets The West of The Night. That project had intended to film the sun setting over China and the moon rising over the United States, symbolically bridging her life between continents. But the abrupt halt of international movement left Zhou unable to finish filming across the Pacific. Out of that halted endeavor, however, a quieter, more introspective form of storytelling emerged—one shaped by the rhythms of nature, the silence of winter, and the artist’s own footsteps in the snow.
Transmuting Distance Into Art: The Genesis of Moon Drawings
Yuge Zhou, a contemporary Chinese artist based in the United States, has always explored themes of identity, dislocation, and memory through her art. However, during the COVID-19 pandemic, these themes took on new urgency. Cut off from her family in China and confined by travel restrictions in Chicago, Zhou found herself grappling with a profound sense of separation—one that transcended mere geography and entered the realm of emotional estrangement.
In this moment of stillness and solitude, Moon Drawings emerged—not as a planned project, but as an organic and almost instinctual response to her condition. What began as a silent ritual has grown into a poignant, time-based series that speaks to the universal experience of longing, cultural detachment, and resilience.
Each of her moon drawings is performed in the early hours of the morning, under the gaze of a waxing or waning moon. Zhou steps onto a snow-covered parking lot, dragging behind her a travel suitcase—a symbol of suspended mobility. As she walks in slow, intentional spirals, the suitcase leaves behind grooves that form circular patterns reminiscent of the moon’s shape. These fragile, vanishing forms, made in isolation, act as both meditations and markings of emotional presence.
Filming the performance from her apartment window, Zhou transforms the mundane urban space into a poetic site of introspection. The moon becomes her collaborator, the snow her canvas, and the suitcase her brush. In the cold quiet, the art becomes a diary—each drawing a stanza in a visual poem about absence and memory.
Symbolism of the Moon in Chinese Cultural Consciousness
In traditional Chinese folklore and classical literature, the moon occupies a symbolic position of immense emotional weight. It represents reunion, cyclical return, and shared moments across distances. During Mid-Autumn Festival, families gather under moonlight to gaze upward in unison, even when apart. This sense of communal looking, of silent yet shared emotional communion, echoes through Zhou’s work.
For Zhou, childhood memories of stories told by her mother enrich her moon-centered practice. Among them, the story of Emperor Wu Di, who built Fu Yue Tai—a viewing platform in his palace from which he could gaze upon the moon’s reflection in a manmade lake—became particularly resonant. Wu Di’s longing for his departed love mirrors Zhou’s own yearning to reconnect with her homeland and family. While his terrace was monumental and imperial, Zhou’s snowy circles are humble and intimate, yet equally charged with emotional gravity.
This cultural thread—the moon as a vessel of emotion, mythology, and memory—forms the philosophical backbone of Moon Drawings. In invoking these ancestral beliefs and integrating them into a contemporary context, Zhou crafts a bridge between historical symbolism and personal ritual.
Art as Quiet Performance: Creating Under Urban Silence
What makes Zhou’s work especially compelling is her use of everyday space and time to reframe the notion of performance. The parking lot beside her high-rise apartment in Chicago is not a traditional venue for art. It is gray, utilitarian, and unremarkable. Yet under her vision, it transforms into a liminal zone, a canvas illuminated by artificial lights and lunar glow.
Her performances are solitary, conducted at dawn when the city still sleeps. The act itself is deliberate and slow, sometimes hindered by ice or snowfall, but always persistent. The suitcase drags through the terrain with weight and resistance, underscoring the metaphor of burden—of the emotional weight she carries, of the paths not traveled.
At first, Zhou was acutely aware of the possibility of being watched. The buildings surrounding the lot, with their glowing windows, seemed to peer down like silent spectators. She imagined neighbors observing her from behind curtains, perhaps confused, perhaps intrigued. This perceived visibility added tension to the act, creating a dichotomy between personal expression and public exposure.
However, over time, she grew inwardly focused. The external gaze faded into irrelevance, allowing the act to become a meditative experience. Her movement across the snow resembled a dance—unrehearsed, instinctual, and deeply internal. This quietness, this near-sacred solitude, has become an integral component of the series.
Seasonal Variation and the Persistence of Ritual
As the seasons shift, so too does Zhou’s medium. Snow gives way to sand, and the wintry parking lot is replaced by the sun-warmed shores of Lake Michigan. Yet the gesture remains the same. The circle endures as a sacred form—a symbol of wholeness, time, and return.
On the beach, the suitcase still plays its part, drawing arcs into the granular surface. But where snow resists and records every movement, sand responds differently—yielding and erasing with greater ease. Wind and water disrupt the drawings, often before they are completed. In this way, summer introduces a more immediate sense of impermanence.
Still, Zhou continues her practice with ritualistic devotion. Each drawing is not an endpoint, but a process. A private rite performed not for spectacle, but for survival. Repeating this gesture across seasons—snow to sand, cold to warmth—she creates a rhythm within her life, a scaffolding that supports her through uncertainty.
The cyclical nature of this act mirrors lunar phases and emotional tides. What is created one day disappears the next, just as the moon waxes and wanes, and memories shift from vivid to vague. Yet the repetition asserts presence. It says: I was here. I am still here.
A Contemporary Lens on Displacement and Belonging
Zhou’s work exists at the intersection of performance art, land art, and diasporic narrative. It does not shout or demand attention; instead, it whispers truths that resonate deeply with those familiar with the pain of separation. Through her minimalist gestures, she explores the emotional architecture of migration—the dislocation, the nostalgia, the perpetual act of navigating between here and there.
The suitcase, central to her drawings, is not merely symbolic of travel; it also represents potential—the imagined journeys that remain unfulfilled. It holds the emotional residue of canceled flights, delayed reunions, and dreams deferred by global crises.
As a contemporary Chinese artist working in the United States, Zhou brings visibility to a perspective often overlooked—the internal world of the immigrant artist caught between physical displacement and spiritual continuity. Her work resists easy categorization. It speaks to emotional truths rather than political declarations, to personal vulnerability rather than collective rage.
In its stillness, her art provides space for reflection, not just for herself, but for anyone who has ever waited, hoped, or loved across borders. Her drawings, though they vanish within hours, leave indelible impressions on the psyche.
Visual Language Without Words: Storytelling Through Silence
One of the most powerful aspects of Zhou’s Moon Drawings is their reliance on nonverbal communication. No spoken language accompanies her performances. There is no audience feedback, no scripted narrative. The act speaks through movement, light, and form.
This visual language—rooted in repetition, in marks left and erased—invites contemplation. It mirrors the ways we process memory and grief: not through loud declarations, but through quiet returns to familiar thoughts, gestures, and places.
Her work also challenges the dominant paradigms of contemporary art that often emphasize spectacle, novelty, and permanence. Zhou’s approach is antithetical to these values. Her art is subtle, evolving slowly, and ultimately vanishing. It does not insist on being seen, yet it invites profound observation.
Even the act of filming her performances from her bedroom window suggests a certain distance—a layer of introspection that adds depth to the viewing experience. She becomes both performer and archivist, documenting a ritual that may otherwise dissolve entirely into time.
A Future Shaped by Continuity and Return
While much of the world has begun to open up post-pandemic, Zhou’s practice continues, undeterred by shifting headlines or reissued visas. Her dedication to Moon Drawings reflects a broader truth about the nature of healing and reconnection: it is not sudden. It does not arrive all at once. It is gradual, circular, and often invisible.
Zhou hopes to one day exhibit the complete series of Moon Drawings—the videos, photographs, and perhaps the suitcase itself—as a unified installation. Yet even without a gallery, the work remains complete in its intent. It has already fulfilled a deeper purpose: to bear witness to longing, to transform space through emotion, and to create beauty in the act of waiting.
Her footsteps in the snow and sand may disappear with time, but they chart an emotional geography that many will recognize. They remind us that longing is not a weakness, but a force capable of producing art, meaning, and transcendence.
In each circle she draws beneath the moon’s light, Zhou reasserts her place in the world. Rooted neither fully in the East nor the West, she stands at a threshold—creating, remembering, and quietly returning, again and again.
The Moon as an Emotional Vessel in Chinese Tradition
Throughout Chinese history, literature, and philosophy, the moon has symbolized far more than an astronomical body. It is a revered entity woven deeply into cultural, emotional, and spiritual life. In Chinese tradition, the moon becomes a reflective surface not only for light but for sentiment—for ancestral memory, longing, separation, and the passage of time. It is a poetic constant, orbiting silently above generations, bearing witness to joy, sorrow, and the enduring bonds of family.
For artist Yuge Zhou, the moon is not merely inspiration—it is a thread to the past, a metaphor for emotional continuity, and a symbol that anchors her creative journey amid dislocation. Born in China and based in the United States, Zhou has found herself physically and emotionally distanced from her origins, a condition made more acute by global events like the COVID-19 pandemic. Her series Moon Drawings is not just a performance—it is an act of cultural remembrance, an offering to the moon as a timeless witness.
The moon’s significance is beautifully illustrated in a story from Zhou’s childhood: the tale of Emperor Wu Di of the Han dynasty. According to legend, consumed by melancholy and yearning for his lost love, the emperor commissioned the construction of a high terrace—Fu Yue Tai, or "the platform for gazing at the moon from above." To fully admire the moon’s reflection, he also ordered a tranquil lake to be placed beneath it. This act of imperial devotion highlights the moon’s symbolic function: a portal between memory and present, between earth and sky.
In Zhou’s work, this ancient mythology is not merely a reference but a living language. Like Wu Di, she creates space for reflection—not through imperial architecture, but through ephemeral gestures in snow and sand. Her circles mimic the moon’s form and its cycles, inscribed temporarily in her adopted urban environment, echoing the same themes of love, distance, and hope.
Lunar Symbolism in Ancient and Modern Chinese Culture
The moon holds an exalted place in Chinese culture, resonating through Tang poetry, Confucian philosophy, Daoist cosmology, and popular festivals. One of the most deeply ingrained traditions is the Mid-Autumn Festival, where families gather to share mooncakes and gaze at the full moon. Even if separated by oceans or continents, loved ones look skyward at the same celestial body, feeling emotionally reunited despite physical absence.
This act of shared lunar observation is part of what makes the moon so powerful—it transcends location. For immigrants and diasporic communities like Zhou’s, the moon becomes a compass of the soul, a connector of lineage and longing. It invites both nostalgia and reflection, and in that tension, profound creativity emerges.
Zhou’s moon drawings participate in this tradition by transforming modern, mundane spaces into sacred ones. Her canvas is a snow-covered parking lot; her brush, a rolling suitcase. But the emotional cadence of her movements, the ritualistic spirals she etches in silence, all pay homage to centuries of cultural practice. She is not just drawing circles—she is invoking ancestors, translating myths, and participating in a collective heritage that spans dynasties and diasporas.
From Imperial Terrace to Chicago Parking Lot
What distinguishes Zhou’s moon rituals is the way she bridges the mythic and the mundane. Emperor Wu Di’s story might be rooted in grandeur, but Zhou’s modern adaptation is grounded in the ordinary—and therein lies its power. Her parking lot, bordered by high-rise buildings and lit by a utilitarian streetlamp, is transformed by the presence of the moon and the intimacy of her act.
From the vantage point of her east-facing apartment in Chicago, she watches the moon rise nightly and films her solitary performances below. The moon acts not just as muse but as mirror. It reflects her own emotions back at her, inviting contemplation and evoking the ancient emperor’s desire to commune with something distant and divine.
The decision to film from a distance adds another layer of meaning. Zhou becomes both performer and spectator, echoing the duality inherent in diaspora: to belong and not belong, to watch and to participate. Her performances are both deeply personal and widely resonant, drawing from her heritage to speak to universal human emotions.
Diasporic Identity and Emotional Geography
Zhou’s experience as a Chinese artist living in the U.S. places her in a unique emotional geography—one marked by cultural hybridity, emotional duality, and perpetual navigation between two worlds. Her work reflects the nuanced reality of immigrants whose identities are not anchored in one place but stretched across time zones, customs, and languages.
In this context, the moon serves as a constant. It becomes a symbol of continuity when other things are in flux. By aligning her art with the moon’s movement, Zhou reconnects with her roots in a quiet but deeply resonant way. The symbolism is potent: while borders remain closed and flights delayed, the moon continues to rise and set, unchanged and unbothered by human circumstance.
Moon Drawings then becomes more than an art project. It is an assertion of belonging, a soft yet steadfast claim on cultural identity. Each drawing is a dialogue between Zhou’s current landscape and her remembered one, a map of emotion written not in ink but in snow and sand.
The Role of Ritual in Healing and Remembering
Ritual has always played a central role in both Chinese tradition and artistic practice. It offers structure, meaning, and solace during times of uncertainty. For Zhou, the act of dragging a suitcase in circles—again and again—is not performative for its own sake. It is an act of remembrance and emotional processing.
There is something deeply therapeutic in repetition. The drawing of circles recalls mandalas, meditation, and the cycles of nature. It is not about the final image, which inevitably disappears with snowmelt or shifting sands, but about the gesture itself. In committing to this ritual across seasons, Zhou creates continuity for herself amid societal and personal turbulence.
What emerges is a rhythm—slow, deliberate, and filled with intention. Her artwork becomes a meditative practice, not separate from life but embedded within it. In this way, she reclaims time, space, and memory as sites of agency and expression.
Moon Drawings as Living Memory and Emotional Cartography
As her drawings disappear, washed away by snowstorms or waves, what remains is not just documentation but a deeply internalized memory. Zhou refers to the moon drawings as both personal diary and collective archive—each performance an inscription of feeling, each erasure a quiet nod to impermanence.
There’s a poetic contradiction in the fact that these works, so tied to place and body, do not last. Yet their impact lies in that very ephemerality. In a time when the digital world immortalizes and commodifies everything, Zhou’s work exists in contrast. It embraces transience. It honors the moment and then lets it go.
This ephemerality does not diminish the work—it deepens it. The emotional residue of each drawing lingers, like the afterimage of a dream. In this way, Moon Drawings becomes a form of emotional cartography—a map not of land but of longing, not of territory but of tenderness.
A Timeless Gesture Across Borders and Eras
Yuge Zhou’s Moon Drawings is a testament to the enduring power of cultural symbolism and the resilience of creative expression in the face of adversity. Through a minimalist yet deeply layered act, she bridges centuries, continents, and emotional states. Her work speaks to the shared human condition: the need to feel connected, remembered, and rooted—even when far from home.
The moon, ever-present and ever-changing, reflects this journey with quiet grace. It watches over her from above as it once did over emperors, poets, and travelers across the ages. In the act of drawing beneath its light, Zhou becomes part of an ancient continuum—a lineage of those who have looked skyward with full hearts and hopeful eyes.
As she continues this ritual across seasons and geographies, her suitcase marks more than snow or sand. It leaves behind traces of resilience, identity, and a longing that defies borders. Each circle is a prayer. Each drawing, a whisper. And the moon, her silent witness, watches still.
Urban Solitude and the Stage of the City
In the depths of winter, while most of Chicago sleeps, Zhou quietly enacts her performances beneath streetlights and stars. Her east-facing apartment window acts as both a lookout and a camera station, transforming the adjacent parking lot into a minimalist stage. Early on, she found herself hyper-aware of potential spectators hidden behind their windows, creating a psychological tension between vulnerability and exhibition.
“I felt as though the building had eyes,” Zhou recalls. “The artificial light exaggerated the sense of theater. It was as if I was being watched, yet no one intervened.” This silent observation from unknown neighbors added another layer to her performance—one marked by the awareness of the unseen, a fitting parallel to the unseen ties that bind her to her home country.
Despite initial discomfort, the process soon became immersive. The choreography of walking with a suitcase through snow shifted from self-consciousness to spiritual focus. Each circle she carved into the surface became part of a greater cosmological ritual, akin to calligraphy written with footsteps rather than ink.
Sand and Snow: Seasonal Dialogues With the Earth
While the snow drawings embody winter’s quietude and impermanence, Zhou has extended her practice into the summer months. On the sandy shores of Lake Michigan, she continues the circular motifs—now in an entirely different elemental context. Sand replaces snow, yet the symbols persist, adapting to new textures and environments without losing their emotional weight.
This duality—snow in winter, sand in summer—forms a seasonal cycle mirroring the lunar phases themselves. In both terrains, the drawings remain fleeting. Waves and wind erase them, just as melting snow wipes away her winter inscriptions. Their transience reinforces the idea of impermanence, reinforcing the central theme of waiting. Not just for return flights or open borders, but for spiritual reunion and a reconnection with roots.
Time as Medium: The Quiet Endurance of Repetition
Zhou’s moon drawings are not one-off performances. She has repeated the act consistently for over two years, anchoring her artistic discipline in ritual and persistence. What remains consistent is not the artwork itself—since each drawing vanishes—but the practice. This cyclical creation reflects a temporal rhythm that pushes against the linear momentum of modern life.
In an age obsessed with documentation, productivity, and preservation, Zhou’s project quietly rebels. Her art disappears almost as soon as it’s created, documented only in ephemeral video clips and personal recollection. The gesture becomes more important than the result, and the emotional resonance outlasts the physical marks on earth.
She acknowledges that while the world around her has transformed—through shifting political climates, changing urban landscapes, and evolving cultural discourse—her quiet ritual has remained unchanged. It is both her resistance and her offering to time.
The Power of Nonverbal Storytelling
Though much of Zhou’s practice relies on visual performance, it is deeply communicative. The suitcase she drags behind her, usually associated with transit and travel, becomes a surrogate for movement when actual travel is impossible. It is both tool and symbol—a vehicle for expression in the absence of words.
Her moon drawings exist without language yet speak profoundly to displacement, nostalgia, and perseverance. They straddle the boundary between performance art and land art, rooted in both Eastern philosophy and Western conceptualism. Their quietness contrasts sharply with the noise of the contemporary art world, giving them a meditative quality that resonates deeply with viewers.
Public Witness and Artistic Privacy
Although the performances are done mostly in solitude before sunrise, Zhou is not entirely alone. Occasionally, passersby in cars observe her from a distance, momentarily becoming unwitting witnesses to her introspective performance. No one has ever approached her, maintaining the silent integrity of the act.
Now that her project is beginning to receive public attention, Zhou is contemplating the future of Moon Drawings beyond the confines of her apartment complex. She envisions exhibiting the full archive of videos, photographs, and personal reflections in a gallery space—creating a contemplative installation where viewers can experience the intimacy and fragility of each moment.
Cultural Resonance and the Lunar Lexicon
Zhou’s project taps into a broader cultural lexicon shared by many diasporic individuals. The moon, often visible simultaneously across continents, becomes a symbol of shared time despite physical distance. Her practice resonates with immigrants, expatriates, and global nomads who understand the quiet ache of being far from home.
Moreover, her work defies rigid categories. It is performance but also drawing. It is private yet public. It is ancient in spirit but contemporary in form. This ambiguity gives Moon Drawings a timeless appeal, drawing connections across cultures and epochs while remaining rooted in one woman's personal narrative.
Final Thoughts:
Yuge Zhou’s Moon Drawings is far more than a fleeting performance or visual gesture—it is a profound, slow-burning meditation on the enduring nature of longing, cultural identity, and the transient beauty of human expression. Rooted in her experience as a contemporary Chinese artist living abroad, the project captures the quiet desperation of waiting—waiting for borders to open, for flights to resume, for moments of reunion to become reality once again.
As she methodically carves circles into snow or sand using a travel suitcase—a tool symbolizing motion and migration—Zhou stages a deeply symbolic act. The suitcase does not carry clothes or objects; it carries memory, desire, and the invisible weight of emotional distance. These drawings, ephemeral by design, are not meant to last in a physical sense. Instead, they persist in emotional resonance. Each performance, executed in solitude and silence, is both a personal offering to the moon and a universal gesture toward anyone who has ever felt distant from home.
The moon, historically and culturally charged in Chinese heritage, becomes Zhou’s silent companion—unchanging yet always in motion. It is the same moon that hovers above her family in Beijing, above the ancient emperors of dynasties long gone, and above countless others who look skyward seeking connection, solace, or remembrance. Zhou’s reverence for this celestial body, and the ways she engages with it through ritualistic art-making, transcend geography and time. It is a dialogue that merges mythology with modernity, performance with meditation.
What makes Moon Drawings especially poignant is its refusal to rush. It honors slowness, silence, and repetition as forms of resistance to the hyper-speed, hyper-visibility of modern life. In a world that often demands immediate results and constant connectivity, Zhou’s patient inscriptions are radical in their softness. They ask nothing but presence. They offer nothing but sincerity.
As she continues this ritual across seasons—between snow and sand, night and day, silence and sound—Zhou weaves a timeless story of separation and hope. Her journey, etched under a moonlit sky, reminds us that even in isolation, art can bridge vast distances. And though her feet may remain on unfamiliar ground, her soul circles closer to home with every step.
