Yigo (Yiguo Jia)

Yigo (b.1999) lives and works in Beijing and London,

A multidisciplinary artist, creating in writing, sculpture, performance, and moving image.

I adore the color of milk, yet find no love for its taste.

I'm drawn to dizziness, but shun the piercing light.

Observing crowds brings me delight, but unbridled proximity, fright.

I savor delicate words, but find language amiss.

In the park, I stroll and find solace, but in two, I recoil.

At times, I find words to be sufficiently good,

Yet oftentimes, they fall short, misunderstood.

If my works could stand as my true introduction,

Then, perhaps, you'd truly find me.

Serious, faded, repetitive, yet absurd

Absurd language, absurd rhythm, and absurd bodies

A point falls, moving in an unseen space - unaware of its destination

Absurdity lies in the absurdity of life itself, where even meaninglessness becomes meaningful

So what remains?

Fragility, exposure, obsession, isolation, and forgetfulness

A touch of numbness lingers

Like a puzzle game,

The eternal screams reside in the edges and contours

The louder the cries, the more glaring the emptiness

My works explore traumatic memories and transient moments in life.I try to portray human vulnerability, and examine identity and intimacy. They are always about 'love', 'loss', 'death' and 'memories'.

I work in multiple media and weave narratives of my private experience and that of others through combining of performance, writing, moving image, installation and photography. By capturing subtle fragments, intimacy and public, reality and fiction, boundaries between art and life are blurred.

My works are visceral and always begin with writing. It is done in unconsciousness, daze and wanderings, in which time and memory are chronic, detached and fermenting.

Some things disappear, while other traces remain.

Walking on the Edge. She is dancing. She is dancing. She is dancing.

Marerial: Jesmonite, Metal sheet, soap base, resin, milk, wheat straw

I realize I am an accomplice, like a love song

Memories are erased through constant repetition, and what is remembered becomes the very essence of "recollection," while the once authentically lived stories grow increasingly blurred. Through scattered sculptures and pseudo-documentaries, I have created a space for reflection. Repetition breeds distance, nullifying reality. The more we revisit something in our minds, the further we drift from the actual events. Thus, what we remember is merely our recollections themselves, along with the narratives we attach, the remnants that linger, and the displacements we generate. In this way, "Truth" becomes a corpse frozen within images, and we ourselves, amidst the perpetual cycle of retrospection, become accomplices in the annihilation of memory, digging our own graves.

In Collaboration with:

Performer: Joe ( Xiaowu Peng )

The most sensitive performer, thank you for the tears you left behind in the dance

Medium:

Mixed media

This is a pseudo-documentary. I fabricated a story about navels, inheritance, and family trauma. The story is performed by an actor - from initially receiving the task and familiarising themselves with the script, to continuously repeating and mechanically reciting memories throughout the process, to eventually the actor gradually believing in this narrative and adding their own life details to it, and the false narrative begins to transform into a memory the actor themselves has truly experienced. I reversed the flow of time and image narrative, with time flowing backward in the film. At the beginning of the story, the audience believes they are watching a genuine monologue, immersing themselves in the details of the story. However, as time passes, the audience starts to realise that everything is rehearsed, and thus all the constructed images and narratives begin to crumble... The credibility of memory and image is questioned, leading to a great panic - because everything appears so natural, the actor unconsciously intertwines fiction and reality in repetition, to the extent that the spoken story becomes so vividly real, but it is all built upon fiction. Therefore, the disintegration of the image mode also represents the collapse of the things themselves...