Yingying Xie is an artist with a Bachelor's degree in Jewellery Design from Beijing Institute of Fashion Technology, minoring in fashion business, and pursued a Master's degree in RCA Jewellery and Metal. As John Berger indicated in his book Ways of Seeing that “Seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognizes before it can speak. Seeing establishes our place in the surrounding world.” Xie utilizes her design works and visual creations as tools to reflect her impressions and resonance with the authenticity of the world. Therefore, she does not limit the implementation of visual languages and always seeks to break the boundaries of different genres and mediums. Her artistic range encompasses various disciplines, including jewellery, sculpture, illustration. It is challenging to categorize these works into a single catalog.
Yingying Xie
Yingying Xie uses contemporary jewelry as an aesthetic carrier and a critical statement to explore the relationship between the spiritual and material worlds in the digital age. The fast-paced lifestyle and the cognitive inertia of the digital era have led us to increasingly rely on external electronic devices to lighten the burden on our brains - hence the birth of the digital hoarder. This phenomenon distorts our perception of time and disconnects thoughts from experiences. To bridge the gap between the virtual and physical realms, she approached her creative work from a ‘slow making’ perspective, immersing herself in a more contemplative present. She utilized the Knitwitter website as a tool to translate the digital information accumulated by different individuals throughout a day as knitting patterns, using hand embroidery to transform intangible digital data into something tangible, touchable, and manipulable, symbolizing the activation state of the data with a change in the color by the photosensitive thread, bringing a sense of physicality and materiality. She aims to promote a more conscious and deliberate digital lifestyle to counteract the negative effects of digital hoarding.
