John Yuyi’s new zine chronicles her nude aeroplane selfies
John Yuyi, Aeroplane Mode 2
Gallery / 10 images
Aeroplane bathrooms are somehow both glamorous and disgusting at the same time. The sexiness of the aeroplane toilet is part of the persistent idea of flying as highly aspirational, with its clichéd connotations of attractive flight attendants, wealth, and exciting destinations. As the locus of the much-lauded Mile High Club, plane bathrooms signify status and erotic adventure. There’s something illicit about the toilets being the only private enclave within the enclosed space of the plane. Perhaps it also has something to do with no longer being earthbound. As liminal non-places lit by clinical, fluorescent light and propelled through the sky at 500mph, there’s also an undeniable JG Ballard-esque quality of technological fetishism that makes aeroplane loos appealing. Nonetheless, they are also cramped, unpleasant public conveniences which devolve into increasing squalor over the duration of the flight. More than one thing can be true.
In 2018, on a 16-hour flight from New York to Taipei, photographer John Yuyi alleviated the boredom of the long-haul trip by taking nude selfies in the bathroom. “It’s now been eight years of taking a selfie every time I go on a plane,” she writes in the foreword of Aeroplane Mode 2, the second zine formed from the archive of in-flight nudes she’s accumulated over the years.
Chatting over Zoom from New York, where she is now based, Yuyi describes the isolation of first moving to America from Taipei, still learning English and being flown business class for work while subsisting hand-to-mouth with very little disposable income. “It was an early stage of my career; I’d come from Taiwan and moved to New York. I just got an artist visa; I was grinding really hard, and then I didn’t really speak English very well. But my career took off, so I was flying to Florence or Miami with Gucci, and then the next week going to Seoul for Burberry, and then coming back and going to Africa with Kenzo,” she recalls. This glamorous lifestyle wasn’t aligned with her financial reality – she was still living with three strangers and some cockroaches in Chinatown. As a freelancer without the infrastructure of studying, it was hard to build friendships. “I felt really lonely, especially as I had to fly all the time. Sometimes I’d not talk to any real humans for days, besides in the deli in Chinatown.”
The loneliness of the frequent flyer is an essential component of Yuyi’s transgressive act – the ennui of being in transit combined with the anonymity of flying alone. “I wanted to do something impulsive on the aeroplane, and I feel a naked photo is a form of harmless, impulsive, and legal behaviour. No one knows you. You’re naked inside the bathroom and outside, with just a thin door between you; the plane is full of strangers all just sitting there,” she explains. “It was a thrill. And then coming back to my seat, as if nothing happened.”
There’s always been something experimental and mischievous about Yuyi’s work, ever since she graduated from fashion college and began an art project custom-making temporary tattoos and plastering them over her naked body. She’s often used herself as a site to explore some of the prevalent facets of modern life – from body image to digital identity, internet culture and mass consumerism. Her 2023 photo book is titled In memory of my ear bone that was once in my nose for two weeks. The day before it went back to my ear, I decided to take my nose on a date to an amusement park, just the two of us. It documented the experience of having a nose jab and then regretting it. Before having the procedure reversed, she commemorated the new nose in a series of self-portraits on rollercoasters and fairground rides to celebrate (or, at least, to acknowledge) the “ridiculousness of my lifetime”.
In the beginning, she made more use of found items as props – playfully peering through the hole of a toilet seat cover or draping herself artfully in toilet roll. Her latest zine has seen her move away slightly from this technique; instead, she now focuses on interesting angles, working with the mirrors and fluorescent lights to both obscure or focus attention on different body parts. “The first one puts more emphasis on styling, using items you can find on the plane and in the aeroplane bathroom. This zine, covering 2021 to 2026, focuses more on angles and playing with the interiors that already exist in the bathrooms. It also comes from the era when the iPhone 0.5 wide-angle lens became really popular, which feels like a visual language that’s very emblematic of this period.”
Not just as a photographer, but also as a citizen of the social media age interested in her image, the limitations of the aeroplane nude offer a framework to document her appearance. “Since I started flying more frequently, the style of the selfies has changed. It’s become a pleasant, fun way to document my life and body within a strict setting, space, and format,” she says. But she’s less interested in thirst traps than she is in creating odd, intriguing portraits. “I think my nudity is quirkier than sexy.”
Aeroplane Mode 2 by John Yuyi is available here. The book launch and signing will take place at Dashwood Books, New York, on September 30 226, from 6–8 pm.
