Scenes from Midtown Manhattan form a ‘play of texture, rhythm and interruptions’

From a distance, Midtown Manhattan makes up part of New York City’s iconic sky-scraping skyline. Among the neighbourhood’s buildings, one can get the sense of being in something like a canyon. And at street level, especially during the workday, the frenetic pace is something that many see as quintessentially New York. In Midtown Flutter, the Chinese-born, Chicago-based artist Yuge Zhou fragments and reassembles the architectural surfaces of Manhattan’s centre and the motion of the people within it, contrasting the stillness of the buildings with the swift, jagged movements of pedestrians and vehicles in the foreground. Zhou describes the resulting collage as a ‘play of texture, rhythm and interruptions’. Midtown Flutter is part of Zhou’s series The Humors, which sets out to explore ‘urban behaviours and relationships, those of people and of the built environment itself’.