In her videos, Nina Yuen creates intimate worlds where the ultrapersonal intersects with broader human experience. Her medium, video, always remains vulnerable to its context and display conditions; Yuen mainly records and edits herself, her work a complex meditation on  gender and self-(re)presentation. Diary entries, childhood memories, forgotten figures from art and history, and philosophical reflections on themes such as death, love, beauty, and creativity are interwoven to produce films in which the boundaries between fiction and reality are threadbare.

Yuen treats video as a tactile medium: her films are sensuous assemblages of image, sound, and narrative that feel both intimate and expansive. Seductively honest, they entwine personal stories with found texts and cultural references, shifting between the diaristic and the mythic. By merging the private with the collective, she crafts works that are simultaneously personal and widely resonant: dreamlike, hypnotic, and enchantingly strange. Recurring themes such as mortality, love, beauty, and creativity thread through her short films, many lasting around five minutes, yet these weighty subjects are always approached with a playful, questioning spirit. Nature often figures as metaphor: branches become bodies, leaves transform into dueling animals, and landscapes loom as existential forces.

Yuen often immerses herself in alternative living environments she constructs for each work. For example, in Clean (2006), she performs daily beauty rituals in unexpected, idiosyncratic ways, turning the familiar into the absurd and strangely compulsive. In Juanita (2010), she inhabits her mother’s cat, extending her playful inquiry into the mundane to explore mortality, ritual, and the measurement of time and distance. Likewise, Mr. President (2012) unfolds in a dreamlike, stream-of-consciousness style, engaging memory, childhood, and loss while balancing fantasy and reality. By deliberately manipulating texts, domestic objects, images, and familiar concepts and drawing on an expansive range of sources – from magic and nature, to her parents’ lives, painter Joe Andoe (Andoe, 2013), feminist writer Simone de Beauvoir (Hermione, 2013), and the adolescent students she teaches – Yuen’s work breathes life into the mundane and the unlikely, revealing the profound within the everyday.