Lingfei Guan

Lingfei Guan (b.1998, China) is a visual artist currently living in London.

She explores the intermediality between contemporary digital media and the personal consciousness of the masses, and analyses the symbolic intentionality in contemporary media image making. Lingfei focuses on the paradoxical moments of collision between personal feelings and social ideologies, from which she reflects on the relationship between personal, cultural and capitalist forces in the media. Multiple layers of media are commonly used to expand the boundaries of communication, exposing the viewer to the limits of the medium of expression and a tipping point where the self can be lost in a capitalist culture.

Standing in the wind to catch the light

Like water floats on the surface

Gradually becoming water

And as if leaping in of its own accord

But not know why

Or like a drowning man

But as a fish watching it

Not to float on the surface and gradually become water

To swim to the bright and soft waves

Where the eye can reach

Where dreams can touch

Launch Project

The Mirror of Peachland

In the pan-visual entertainment phenomenon of contemporary society, I am concerned with the narrative capacities derived or altered by the language of media and the substitution of media itself, and explore the disappearance of subjectivity in the medium of recording personal histories.

I concatenates and juxtaposes the diaries of stranger during the Cultural Revolution with the video journals of individuals in the current digital age, and parallels these clips with a private dialogue, which is the sounds of reading of these diaries combined with whispered monologues.

As the textual and pictorial content in the clips from different eras continue to correlate, sound begins to alienate and question. The resonance of the instrumental guqin with the performance as a thought fluctuation that interprets the entrance of the image allows the audience to slip from the subject-object duality of 'dialogue' to the empathy and experience of the subject.

This project is attempted to gain the viewer's suspicion of the uniqueness and certainty of the image subject, and to reflect on the broad associations brought about by the textual medium and the restrictive nature of the image medium as well as the disappearance of individual subjectivity under the coercion of mass media.

Medium:

Moving image

Like broken straw before the wind And as chaff blown away by the storm

Launch Project

Lingfei Guan

The Mirror of Peachland

Medium:

Social

About

Royal College of Art