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Visual Communication (MA)

Wanlin Jiang

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Wanlin Jiang is a botanical adventurer. Wanlin initially gained attention with her collaborative project Plant Whisper, followed by a series called Plant Secrets. Her work focuses on the study of plants explored through the discipline of Visual Communication as a bridge to create meaningful connections between humans and nature. 

Wanlin works across different media, ranging from installations, sculptures, sound design, people’s theatre, experimental videos, etchings, paintings, publications and more. She has received widespread press, multiple awards, and has painting and sculptural work in numerous private collections. She is co-founder of Plant Whisper Studio.

CLIENTS

Vogue+ China; Kinfolk China; White Noise; Iklectik; abC Art Book Fair; Chapel Arts Studios; Taoxichuan Art Center; Jingdezhen Taoxichuan Glass Studio; Hangzhou OoEli; Beijing Quanyechang Cultural Arts Center; Cheung Kong School of Art & Design's Museum; Cloud Mountain Biodiversity Conservation and Research Center.

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Nature and plants are my inspiration, mentors, confidants and soul mates. If you ask me what I really want to do before my death, I wouldn’t create any artwork. I just want to lie in a bed of plants in peace, listening deeply.

In my mind, creating artwork is not the most important drive. I just choose art as a medium to encounter the plants, to have a conversation, to grow, to become a better human and for us to live in harmony together.

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Plants on the Move — After making the individual prints, they are reassembled to create more possibilities and stories.

We often admire plants for their steady rootedness, their commitment to one location. But plants -or rather, forests- are perhaps not the firmly moored and reliable places that we might think they are.

Plants move and reproduce primarily through seed dispersal, relying upon animals, winds, and waters to carry their offspring to fertile soils, where they might anchor into the ground and germinate. 

I have made a visualisation from black and white to colour by using the collected plant movement trajectories. At the same time, the combination of etching's textural translations gives more emotional value to these mysterious journeys. This series of prints allows the audience to feel the stories of migration told by the plants through the colours and textures of the images, thus provoking the audience to think about the relationship between humans and plants.

What is the connection between the plants’ migration and the ecological systems and human communities that they are leaving behind? What does the movement of these beings tell us about the present and foreshadow for the future?

Plant Whisper 01.mp4 — Plant Whisper Concept Trailer
Plant Whisper 02.mp4 — Plant Whisper installation is a 3D plant-trajectory scene, which is hung from the branches of the Runway Tree and consists of 500 unique glass plant-trajectories, real flowers, branches and glass insects.
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Launch Project
Plant Whisper — Audiences communicated with glass trajectories and insect sculptures in the exhibition.

Plant Whisper is a collaborative research project by me and digital artist Yunling Wu, focusing on the visualisation of plants dancing in the wind (2021–Present).

We have adopted the following working principle: 

Collection of images and information - Analysis of movement points - Output of dynamic records - Collation of static visualisations - Archiving - Experimentation with derivative art forms.

Curiosity, observation, documentation and archiving of the natural aesthetics embedded in the plants themselves was our starting point, but in one interaction after another, our consideration of the relationship between humans and plants continued to evolve.

What do these beautiful poetic and mysterious symbols mean? Are we using human concepts to decode the language of plants in a way that we think is correct? There are still no answers yet. Rather than being the answerer, we offer the perspective of the questioner in the hope of evoking a little thought in the viewer.

In Collaboration with:

Yunling Wu is an artist and visual experimenter often working with experimental videos and data-based digital animations who enjoys wandering through the world of digital landscapes, finding logic in the natural world, and searching for natural aesthetics in logic.

Medium:

Website, Archive, Book, Experimental Video, Installation

Size:

Varies
archivecommunicationdanceglassglass-sculptureinstallationlanguagemovementnatureplantssculpturesymbol
Become a Little Plant Adventurer Workshop 01.mp4 — This video documents the highlights of the workshop and the children's presentations of their insect sculptures.
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Become a Little Plant Adventurer Workshop — Children collected fallen branches and plants in the park and combined them with the waste products to create unique insect sculptures.
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Launch Project

During the exhibition, the Plant Whisper Team held the ‘Become a Little Plant Adventurer Workshop’ to encourage the children to discover the wonderful dance and movement of plants, and create their own unique insect sculptures.

Plant Concert 01.mp4 — This video documents the whole process of the plants playing music with their audiences.
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Plant Concert — Details of the sound installation.
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In Plant Concert, each element develops its own individuality and unique nature through the dynamic interplay of mechanism, rotation and material. When participants walk into the installation, they step on the fallen leaves and create a new sound.

Can only humans be great musicians ? Plant Concert will tell you the answer.

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Royal College of Art

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