Surplus Heat and City Quilt
Location: Library, 2nd Floor (Spring 2027)
Artist: Yuhan Zhao
This project consists of two interconnected works, Surplus Heat and City Quilt, developed as part of my ongoing series The Guest (来客). The series reflects on what it means to inhabit New York as a foreigner—moving through the city, observing it, and coexisting with it without fully belonging. Across paintings and mixed-media installations, I focus on overlooked fragments of everyday urban life, especially the marginal and often invisible non-human inhabitants that persist at the edges of human systems.
The work reflects on the shifting conditions of urban infrastructure today. As AI-driven systems demand increasing amounts of energy, the expansion of these infrastructures often compresses the space of everyday life. Yet the heat escaping from underground steam pipes remains a vital resource for survival during the winter. In contrast to hostile urban design, such as anti-bird spikes or benches that prevent rest, this heat operates as an unintended form of sharing. It sustains both human and non-human life, offering a counterpoint to the logic of exclusion embedded in the built environment.
The imagery also engages cultural representation. In the twentieth century, scenes such as Marilyn Monroe standing over a subway vent turned infrastructure into spectacle. Today, these same sites carry different meanings. As American manufacturing declines, “Made in USA” markings on manhole covers point to more complex relations between labor, production, and national identity.
City Quilt complements this work by transforming a rigid Con Edison grate into a soft silicone surface. While industrial markings remain visible, the object is stripped of its hardness and becomes tactile, almost fabric-like. This translation from iron to “quilt” repositions infrastructure from something impersonal and fixed into something intimate, domestic, and open to reinterpretation.
Artist Bio:
赵予菡 Yuhan Zhao (b. 2004, Chengdu, China) is currently pursuing dual majors in Art History (Visual Arts) and Political Economy at Barnard College, Columbia University, New York, USA.
Zhao’s artistic practice spans painting, installation, and new media, focusing on the intersection of gender, identity and East Asian culture. Drawing from personal and collective experiences of womanhood, Zhao explores survival, visibility, and agency within shifting societal structures. By blending conceptual depth with tactile forms, her work often invites spectators to engage with vulnerability, shame, and the politics of seeing.
Zhao also creates large-scale public installations that integrate natural environments. Her artistic trajectory is shaped by multiple artist residency experiences, including the Aranya Theater Festival’s Migratory Birds 300, the Burning Man Project, and the Wild Land Art Festival. In 2025, she was selected as a fellow at the Yale Norfolk School of Art, a prestigious summer program hosted by Yale School of Art for emerging undergraduate artists.
Her work has been exhibited internationally in cities such as New York, New Jersey, and Nevada, USA; as well as Chengdu, Wenzhou, Fuzhou, and Shanghai, China.
Zhao currently lives and works in New York, USA.