EVENT: YUCHI MA (JUNE 26—JULY 9 2026)

Red Threads (我很爱你 / I love you very much)

digital video/machinima, color, sound, 12 min, 2022, China

Created by Yuchi Ma

Yuchi Ma’s Red Threads (我很爱你 / I love you very much) (2022) is a 12-minute single-channel video that treats distance not as an absence but as a managed condition. Moving between live action, The Sims 4 machinima, browser and webcam frames, and the tactile labor of sewing, Ma draws on the Parachute Kid experience – the transnational experience of being sent abroad for schooling – to examine how filial love is routed through technologies of care and the economies of international education. The work’s key image is borrowed from Song of the Wanderer, a Tang-dynasty poem in which a mother stitches clothes for a departing child; in Ma’s hands, thread becomes bond, script, wound and line of fate. Against the fantasy of the screen as a portal, Red Threads insists on the interface: an apparatus that connects only by marking separation. Its avatars, domestic objects and sewn surfaces do not resolve the artist’s American, Chinese and Chinese American selves into a single image, but hold them in anxious proximity.

Yuchi Ma (马语迟) is an artist and filmmaker from Beijing, China who identifies with the experience of the Parachute Kid. Working across video, installation, and machinima, she examines intercultural experience, language, family, migration, and separation through forms that move between live action and digital simulation. She received a BFA in Film and TV Production from the University of Southern California in 2019 and an MFA in Design Media Arts from UCLA in 2022. Her work has been presented by Slamdance Film Festival, Fellows of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, LA Artcore, and Occidental College’s MAC Cinematheque, among other venues. In 2023, Red Threads received the Grand Jury Prize for Experimental Shorts at Slamdance, and in 2025 LA Artcore presented her first solo exhibition, Pandas are Pandas.