Jiangnan Tang 唐江楠

Jiangnan Tang 唐江楠 (Emma)(b.1998) is a multidisciplinary artist, director, art director, digital artist and fashion designer from Hangzhou, China. Her works often revolve around images and installations. She enjoys engaging in cross-dimensional and cross-disciplinary creative work, exploring and discussing the emotional needs and emotional connections of humans at different stages of their lives.

In addition to this, she is often involved in some work as an art director, especially in the field of fashion.

In recent years, my works have revolved around exploring human emotional needs and connections at different stages. I enjoy the process of emotional exploration. I believes that in the current social environment human beings are prone to self-neglect and self-blurring, and that moving images and immersive spaces can provide them with a richer emotional experience and emotional care, and compensate for some of their "expectations" that cannot be met in reality.

Therefore I enjoys working and interacting with people of all ages and backgrounds, observing and recording different expressions and emotions, visualizing emotions, building emotional magnets, observing how people can better access emotional experiences and perceptions, and stimulating imagination and reflection on virtual emotional experiences.

When people are faced with separation from their pets or their pets’ deaths, they also need an object to send their thoughts to or a space to allow for mourning. Loss and death are things we can never avoid, and for many people pets are family and companions who bring spiritual support and emotional companionship to the "lonely contemporary". Even when we know that it is a struggle against an end that we know will fail from the start, we still want to keep them with us forever.

So what will happen to the remains of the pets’ identities when they are gone? How will they be reseted? How will they be remembered? How can the feelings of people who have lost their pets be supported and comforted?

I spent a week visiting four pet-owning families from different backgrounds in London. During my visits, I had conversations with them, played with their pets, and collected information. Based on the symptoms of "pet loss syndrome," the final stage of grief proposed by American psychiatrist Kubler Ross, and Stan Rawlinson's book "The Ten Commandments of Dog Ownership" (1993), I adapted and created eight short stories about the bond between humans and their pets.

“Be Here” hopes to create a meditative space for people who have been forced to separate from their pets or have experienced the death of a pet to think, pray and mourn through moving images created by 3D animations and 360 camera shots, using the concept of ‘rebirth’, establishing diverse ways of facing separation and death, as well as transcending dimensional emotional transmission and dialogue between life and death, healing sealed memories of escape and allowing good memories to continue to radiate love. At the same time, the loss of a pet also offers the opportunity to meditate on the brevity of life and the separation caused by death, as well as ways to overcome the loss of all we loved.

Jiangnan Tang 唐江楠

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Royal College of Art