Ge Yulu: Eye Contact Favorite 

Ge Yulu’s artistic practice playfully pulls at the strings of a social system that, although seemingly all-encompassing, is in fact a malleable structure consisting of individual human beings. For his 2016 project Eye Contact, Ge positioned himself in front of a surveillance camera and stared directly into the lens for hours, then negotiated with a security guard to buy the footage. “It represented the elimination of the barriers separating us,” Ge told Ding Yining and Shi Yangkun for Sixth Tone. “When the guy copied the clip for me, he was no longer part of the system.”

In an interview he did with CCTV news, he said, "I searched for surveillance cameras nearby, set up a tripod, climbed to a close distance with the surveillance camera, and then faced it directly. Normally, surveillance is to watch over us, but can't I also watch it? Here, what I question is a kind of surveillance power. I can't make any substantive changes to it; I just stare at it. I strive to stare for a few hours to make the person watching me from behind aware or to have a moment of eye contact between us. I feel that would be great. I think it's a romantic thing because every day, someone watches these streets behind the camera. Suddenly, when two pairs of eyes meet, I feel there will be a moment of warmth."