Ye Zhang 张晔 | Tomato

Ye Zhang is a digital designer and artist based in London and Shanghai, He has the undergraduate degree from Shanghai Donghua University, currently studying at the Royal College of Art. He uses video installations and graphics to create narratives, also using real objects and digital connection to explore the identity and social issues. His work has been exhibited in London and Shanghai.

In his practice, Ye focuses on the intimate connection between people and their surroundings, his work re-examines the connectedness of physical and digital space and experiments with different materials and multi-dimensional narratives to connect with people.

He is also part of the Snap Inc. x RCA design lab project, working on the critical use and application of AR technology.

What am I looking for? Like this message I received on Grindr, it is simple and straightforward, but often makes it difficult for me to answer. Is it the intimate connection we have with others, the feeling that we are validated, or the constant contradictory behaviour of our inability to unify our bodies and minds? I am constantly talking to people and the answer becomes more and more complex in these conversations; the constant cycle of desire in the social sense as the output of our bodies affecting ourselves, leading to the unification of our consciousness and our bodies. I as a listener and storyteller will explore how the remnants of desire scattered throughout the crowd can be collected and transformed into a visual and auditory presence that can be felt, in order to construct a central point to form positive emotional feedback within the group.

Warning: This section contains mature or explicit content.

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Launch Project

“What are you looking for?” – "What are you looking for?" is a reflection on intimacy and longing using queer and is expressed in a dual narrative through digital and physical space. This immersive space will feature AR and physical sculptures, as well as including interactive installations. Through this space I will tell my stories and those of the interviewees to answer the question "what are you looking for?" Trying to construct an exploratory narrative that forms an intimate connection with the audience.

Sculpture 1 – These sculptures are a figurative representation of my upbringing and an exploration of the intimacy of the cool child, all of which intertwine in response to my trauma and ambiguous intimate entanglements. ↓Click below for more↓

Launch Project

Practice videos

Medium:

Mix Medium

video – This project explore a non-acute perspective on the relationship between ourselves and other objects, while exploring alternative expressions of bodily extension. When we leave traces and echoes in digital space, do they become our creations, just like the physical traces we leave behind unconsciously, do these digital creations have some of the same intimacy as contact traces, do they represent our physical projections, our extensions of consciousness?

Pic of Practice – What we project onto the material is our body refraction, It is precisely our reflection on the body that makes us project our will onto the material, and the shaped object ends up becoming another of our bodies. And this object that we shape will have a connection and intimacy with us, a reflection of our own gender, our spiritual world The traces of digital space and physical space intermingle and feed back into each other, ultimately forming an organic whole that responds to our physical movements and ex