Yuan Chuang
About
Yuan Chuang graduated from the China Central Academy of Fine Arts.
His work explores memory, culture, and existence through the lens of psychoanalysis. He is also connecting these concepts to traditional Chinese philosophy and mystics which have inspired him, and reunderstanding the relationship between man and man, man and things, man and nature. At the present stage, his practice is focused on video, printmaking and painting.
Exhibition experience:
Journey of a Thousand Miles Group Exhibition, 2018
Wanying Young Artists Exhibition, 2019
Statement
I look at the relationship between memory, language, culture, time and history from a psychoanalytic perspective.
Language divides the meaning of things and acts on our existence...
Video editing is used as a primary means of interfering with Video. I find scenes from different times, places and cultures, and I overlap their images, so that things from different places share a space, and different times are woven together -- visualizing the way language works. My videos are sometimes like collages and sometimes like moving drawing. In this way I question whether meaning is stable in our minds: How It floats and glides...
I am interested in the tension between presence and absence: how memory, as an object of desire, separates things verbally and connects them in some way; and how it shuttles between the inner and outer world of complexities.
I once tried to explain one video to another, but I got caught up in more explanations-i tried to make it easier for the audience to understand the work, which inevitably made it more complicated. In the network of symbols, meaning emerges and dissipates in different contexts, constantly entering our bodies through metaphor and metonymy, forming echoes of memory, like a flame that has no substance, but that we actually are and feel its temperature all the time. I indulge in its poetic spark, enjoying the miserable familiarity. Then I open my eyes, but I'm still not sure I see the morning sunlight.
A interpretation
China's long-term yearning for the west and learning, can create a discourse of conflict and variation, but is also enriching for their own culture in this exchange.
The traditional Chinese mysticism holds that everything has an inherent energy, and that only when matter is attached to the flame can its energy be released, and that only when the flame is attached to the burning matter can it not be extinguished. Intangible culture is attached to tangible material to be retained and transmitted. People can not touch the flame, but always feel its temperature.
The video was originally created as an explanation for the video 'Unsettled'. But then it became a work of its own, and as a result I got caught up in more interpretation, I wanted to make it easier for the audience from different cultural backgrounds to understand the work in this way, providing a similar context which turns out to be more complicated. The video strayed from my original intention, but watch it 'Unsettled'.
Please watch in 1080p mode for the best quality.
Medium: Video
Size: 1920x1080
Unsettled
The Forbidden City, The Imperial Palace of the Ming and Qing Dynasties, is located in the capital of China. It is regarded as a symbol of Chinese culture. Later, two Palace Museums were built in Taiwan, and a Palace Museum has a branch in Hong Kong.
Under different discourses, their original meanings are gradually hollowed out and replaced, they complement and resist each other, they serve as the background of each other, and erode each other.
But in the gap between the different Palace Museums, what lingers is a familiar temperament and aura.
Please watch in 1080p mode, for best quality viewing.
Medium: Video
Size: 1920x1080
Babble
I was forced to move during the Covid outbreak, and I was locked down here for almost a year. Imagine my experience of moving all the time.
I miss those days with my family day and night, the process is a little difficult, but flat and full.
Medium: Video
Size: 1920x1080
Sponsors
China's long-term yearning for the west and learning, so that the Chinese culture in the west under the discourse of the conflict, variation, but also enrich their own. The traditional Chinese mysticism holds that everything has an inherent energy, and that only when matter is attached to the flame can its energy be released, and that only when the flame is attached to the burning matter can it not be extinguished. Intangible culture is attached to tangible material to be retained and transmitted. People c