Yuhang Zeng
Yuhang is a visual artist, his works in a range of media including installations, moving images and photography. His works mainly concern with daily scenes with a creative and lighting way to express. He considers applying poetic creative methods to illustrate my daily observation and thinking. His practice finds pleasure in the ambiguous expression of things and uses this ambiguity as a creative language to respond to everyday observations and the revelation of problems.He completed a BFA in Art Education at the GAFA (2018).
Everything Is Under Control
The practice begins with the filming of electronic switches to reflect the human desire for control and how control systems permeate society as a whole. On a personal level, the reliance on control, the desire for stability and the quest for control are expressed through many simple switchgear devices. For example, with contemporary society’s increasingly strict management of time, the development of industrial design has tended towards a high degree of simplification and functionality. In terms of social pairs, it reflects the increasing control of lifestyles and anxieties and the growing contradictions of social instability. At the same time, the switchgear is documented in the form of photographs and videos, reflecting the powerlessness people feel in the face of the hope of being in control.
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The crushed cans on the street look like a particular urban mark. The exaggerated distortion of this mark, which is only possible with the tremendous force that accompanies the squeezing and stamping of it by people, reminds me of the human violence and indifference towards cheap consumer goods that is implied behind the can. The fast-consuming and easy-to-use properties of the can diminish the perception of the container itself. But it seems to me that each squeezed can hide a story behind it. I anthropomorphise junk cans and tell the story of each can’s journey through a kind of fictional crime investigation. In this way, I question the positioning of fast-moving products and explore the value of the commodity.
I used a large number of images of cans as the main visual element of my practice and felt a visual invasion when confronted with such a large, almost repetitive number of photographs. This invasion was uncomfortable and made me feel like a worker on the production line of a beverage factory. I materialised the process of pasting images on the computer to simulate the experience of assembly line production in this repetitive labour production process. I see the cans as mere images and further distort them from their already distorted form, from a record of a real object to a digital product that does not completely lose its character. At the same time, I print photographs onto satin, experimenting with deformable materials to explore how images can be distorted in real space. The effects of image overload are simulated through different practices.
The new portrait of seagull
The next morning after I arrived to Glasgow, I was awakened by the cry of seagulls outside the window. Then I realized that I had never seen seagulls in China such it can be see everywhere in here. In the next few days, I was also awakened by the seagulls outside the window. Out of curiosity about new things, I decided to record it with my camera when they will show up every time. However, after I took only 12 pictures of seagulls, they never appeared again. Then I decided to do a project with seagulls as the main element. This project about seagull is inspired from my daily observation, using different kind of small-scale stuff to compose into a whole project. In my imagination, every small-scale work is based on the transformation and fabrication of real events. In order to further blur the boundaries of facts, I hope my whole project is like a reproduction of a biologist’s research site. I hope to construct a familiar and unfamiliar image of seagulls through these fragments of images so that we can re-examine the relationship between humans and animals, at the same time, extend our thinking about the identity of different communities.
