About

The white cube asks for a particular quiet, and it asks for it the same way everywhere in the world. A running track does the same thing to the body: four hundred metres, the same lanes, always anticlockwise, identical in every country. Both standardise how you are allowed to be there.

What interests me is the other space, the one you make inside a practice, where the noise is your own breath, your steps, the pen, the keyboard, the pause. Not repetition but ritual: a time and a place in which you can hold a proper conversation with yourself, through the body and the mind at once, in whatever landscape you are crossing. Art and sport meet at the heartbeat.

The run that thinks and the essay that moves are one act, produced by the same intelligence, arriving through the same body.

I do not think we are many people. The contemporary habit is to divide ourselves with slashes - director, researcher, someone who likes pizza - and it looks like simplification, but it only makes more holes to fill and more niches to fit into. There is one individuality in each of us, facing the world.

Biography

Dr Zejun (Jun) Yao is an interdisciplinary artist, researcher and endurance coach, working in English, French and Mandarin. His practice moves between sport, visual and time-based art, and writing without treating these as separate disciplines. The body is the through-line: subject, instrument, and the site where thinking becomes visible. The work is made to be completed by the people who meet it.

He trained in film direction at ESEC in Paris, took an MA in coopération artistique internationale at Université Paris 8, and holds a practice-led PhD in Fine Art from the University of Leeds, where his research introduced the concept of the artisthlete: a practice that refuses the division between art-making and athletic performance. He taught at Leeds for six years, across History of Art, Cultural Studies and Fine Art studio, and was subsequently Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Leeds Arts and Humanities Research Institute.

His work takes the form of photography, performance, installation, audiovisual and collaborative practice, and he has worked as cinematographer, producer and director on short films screened at international festivals. He founded and led YOOOART, a Paris-registered artists' association for international cooperation, and curated My Dream Place Born in 60 Seconds, a two-volume anthology of one-minute artists' films made to an open call issued in five languages, which premiered at the Taipei and Kaohsiung film festivals in 2015 and travelled on in Taiwan and France.

He has exhibited and performed at The Tetley in Leeds, the Ruskin Gallery in Cambridge, EINA in Barcelona, the RUN! RUN! RUN! Biennale at the University of Kent in Paris and the Institut français du Japon - Kyushu in Fukuoka, with touring solo exhibitions across France and six Chinese cities, and has been invited to speak at international symposia on art and sport. TriARThlon (2022), the work the doctorate ended on, was a large participatory installation made with the Théâtre de la Poudrerie for its season opening, within l'Odyssée à Sevran, a project of the Olympiade culturelle for Paris 2024; its final part, TriARThlon la finale, was a site-based solo performance on Ilkley Moor, where the examiners were led on foot across the moor to meet the work.

Four artists' books carry the same enquiry into print. On the Run (Café Royal Books, 2024), made with a Café Royal Publishing Grant and held in Special Collections at the University of Leeds Brotherton Library, is a photographic work about running made from the inside. Three earlier books were published by Wild Pansy Press in Leeds: JUN: Juste Un Nom (2019), Nowhere Nowhere Nomad (2019) and Let Jun Run (2015).

The same question runs through the rest of the work. In illustrated publishing he has worked in art direction, commissioning and production management, developing other people's authorship. In Taipei since 2025 he has taught and coached in three languages: enrichment teaching at the Lycée International Français de Taipei, where movement is a way into learning rather than a subject of its own; participatory learning designed for a university social-responsibility programme at National Chengchi University; and athletes from children to the masters of the Rotary triathlon club. It is the same question the art asks, put to a person rather than to a room. He is licensed by UK Athletics, coached at the University of Leeds Cross Country Club and trained for five years at Leeds Triathlon Centre, and is a practising runner and triathlete.