Yuliku Chen was born in Shenzhen when it was still a comparatively small Chinese city. By the time she reached adulthood, it had grown to be one of the most important cities in China, the major technological centre for the country, and therefore, one of the most important technological centres in the world.
But Yuliku did not want to be a software developer, spending her days writing code. Rather, she was much more interested in people, their behavior, and the reasons behind their behavior. From an early age Yuliku was very aware of the behavior of people in her group at kindergarten. She was sensitive to their feelings and emotions, the things which underpinned and explained their behavior.
When she came to Canada in 2012 she began to find ways of trying to explore her new home with an eye to how people thought and felt, and what they thought and felt. She wanted to get to know the people of her new home as much as she could.
Taking a very brave step for a fairly introvert immigrant, who didn't feel totally confident about her English (the third language she had learned), she bought a digital camera and began to approach complete strangers in the streets, parks, bars, and cafes of Toronto to ask them to convey their emotions, their deepest thoughts and feelings, their hidden desires. Things they never told anybody else, and rarely admitted to themselves.
The result of this focused, systematic, energetic, and time-consuming work is what Yuliku calls The Library of Emotions.This amazing project encompasses an enormous range of silent expressions of all of the many – often subtle – feelings that contemporary humans in Canada feel. When people taking part in her video project express their feelings and emotions, it is often the first time they have ever conveyed them to anyone. Yuliku has a knack of getting people to open up to her, a stranger, in a way that they cannot even do with their closest, dearest friends. This ability to get strangers to open up to her is part of what underpins the special quality of Yuliku's work. People trust her. She also has an innate ability to read people, knowing who will be a good subject and who will not.
The Library of Emotions is ethnographic research. It is social anthropology. But instead of traveling to some obscure part of the globe to research the emotions of people, Yuliku does it on her own doorstep. She helps the people of the city she lives in to come to terms with their own feelings, needs, and desires. Then she shares this information and knowledge with the rest of the city, and the rest of the world, to help people understand themselves, and others.
At a time when the world can feel so atomized and separate, when people can easily feel alienated from each other, Yuliku's Library of Emotions brings us all together as human beings. No matter what our social or economic status. No matter where we live. No matter who we are.
More info: youtube.com