Yezi Lou's 'Yellow Pages' and the Fragments of Diasporic Memory

New York-based visual artist and writer Yezi Lou explores memory, migration, and cultural nostalgia through painting, collage, and drawing. Her ongoing series 'Yellow Pages,' begun in 2025, transforms a discarded Chinese-language directory of immigrant-owned businesses in Southern California into layered portraits and narrative scenes. Part of this series is currently on view in 'Specimens' at A/W Space in Nanjing, China. Lou's practice draws from personal photographic archives, films, found images, and cultural symbols, treating images as active counterparts to lived experience. Born in Wenzhou, a city marked by rapid industrial growth, she witnessed how objects became markers of status and desire—an awareness that informs her work. Her next project turns toward surveillance webcam imagery from publicly accessible networks, questioning how attention can transform abandoned images into meaningful artifacts. Lou's paintings resist fixed meaning, holding fragments of personal and collective history in suspension.