Yue Jin
About
I am an interdisciplinary researcher and visual designer based in London and Shanghai, working across performance, installation, and moving image. My practice focuses on questioning people’s generally recognized ideology and inspiring them to think beyond.
I graduated from the China Academy of Art, and after that, I worked as an art director in advertising for many years. The experience of working has led me to rethink the digital world that relies on the experience of the eye. I began to explore embodied cognition, the body as an essential medium for me, as a mediator, a method and a pathway to perceive space and material.
I am passionate about interdisciplinary expression and take speculative positions on discourses within art, technology, and philosophy. I aim for the public to rethink the human body and explore embodied cognition. Understanding of embodiment is received through the perceptual organs of the body, rather than through the informationized model of vision sent to the brain.
Statement
In my practice 'Becoming Water,' I aim to develop the mythology of performance and engage the public to rethink our relationship with water in urbanized environments context.
Water is in our lives and flows right through us. Water connects the human scale to other scales of life, both unfathomable and imperceptible. It is a powerful lens through which we think about the future world. The practice is a development of a hydro-mythology that considers the urban landscape's greywater systems and their connection to the ocean. I use the kitchen, toilet, and bathroom as the stage for the performance, as well as the embodiment of the water gods through the complex pipe system of the home.
I develop a somatic approach to exploration, which starts from the concept of the Body Architect, understanding space and objects through body movement, touch, and listening. It also comes from a practice and method of 'Choreographing the City.' I hope to use this way to experiment with performance and explore the relationship between water and body: How do we flow together and shape each other?
Exploration: The hidden world of water
Most of the time we can go about our daily lives without knowing anything about the hidden world of water. Our understanding of water is generally superficial and reductive: we perceive it, above all, as a resource, an imprisoned liquid surface separated from the remaining matter. This restricts the way we relate to it.
The miles of pipes that bring water into our homes from distant locations, day and night, whether or not we are aware of their existence. In daily life, these things get lost in time due to seeing something so often that it becomes an unconscious part of the process. So how can this part of the consciousness be awakened?
Experiment: Scenario and materials
Body - Space - Image
A collection of body shapes, based on personal movement vocabulary, draws connections between body-space-presence-travel. A collection of disruptive, abstract, poetic, and symbolic movements and gestures generate a new space order, in which we are moving nowhere, together apart. The body, how it moves and dreams, becomes a route to the imagination.
Are we in or out of the water? Does it take up space or is it a space?
Medium: Performance, Moving image
Experiment: Shapes of the human
Dynamic Landscapes: borders that don't exist
Our flesh is fed by streams whose sources are beyond our view. Conscious of our relationship with bodies of water, in a gestating, differentiating, and inter-permeating relation.
Experiment: Bodies of Water
Water Governs Us
Imagine your body as an empty container. Refill your body with water. Move around with your liquid body. Let yourself be submerged by this underwater world. Liquify yourself.
Connecting to the water both inside of me and outside of me, I acknowledge that one-ness. As human beings connecting to the water inside and outside of us, we begin to understand governance from the perspective of water.
Research Process
Reflection and Potential Development
WATER CONFLICTS
Where does the water flow?
Urbanization is also adding pressure to an already uneasy situation, and if people move to the growing urban centres, the demand for water in these places will also rise. As a result, water is being diverted from rural and wilderness areas to meet urban demand, but farmers are already stretched to the limit.
"Whose water is it, anyway?"
Maude Barlow asks - questioning water ownership. Today, the climate emergency intensifies the existing challenges the water crisis poses.
How has water become an essential part of your life?
While it is true that climate change is making the water crisis worse, it is also true that our mismanagement of water is making the climate crisis worse. All will be well if we turn the tap off when we brush our teeth.
Continued attempts to rigidly and systemically control the power of water demonstrate the limitations of man-made governance as being a centric belief of man in dominion over natural laws. We are not above nature. We are nature.
We are the body of water.