Jiang Yunshan姜蕴珊 is an artist and photographer based between London and Shanghai.
She uses iconography as a tool to explore the complex relationships that exist between people and images, and uses media such as photography, moving image and sculpture, and critically examines how these relationships shape our understanding of the world around us.
Education:
2023 MA Contemporary Art Practice, Royal College of Art
2013 BA Art Design, Luxun Academy of Fine Arts
It is a commonly recognised methodology to analyse the 'objects' of society and nature, with human beings as the subjects.
Yunshan, while studying and living away from her home country, became aware of the ideological differences that exist between countries. Using the social imaginary as an entry point, she seeks to explore the connections between what constitutes this collective from the perspective of human, society, technology as a whole.
In the project Daedalus, she uses flour mills as materials, drawing on general association with incomprehensible mechanical drawings to explore the misconceptions of social norms, and uses moving images and metal bread to narrate the ambiguity between subject and object.
This project is inspired by Guy Debord's The Society of the Spectacle. I take the image from real-life materials, and by presenting the process of abstracting landscape architecture into images, I hope to explore the possibility of landscape architecture as an image medium. In today's society, spectacle, as a form of image, is completely enveloping our daily lives. This forces people to see the world through various special media. And it is through these images, we thus accumulate the concepts of the world.
Based on this, I decompose the cognitive process of the commodities as spectacle. I try to disassemble the abstract symbols by treating images as a means of interpretation. Through the extraction and combination of the symbols, the work turns the three-dimensional, composite material structure into a flat image, before it is materialized again. A three-dimensional installation is used to present the state of landscape architecture as a medium. I hope that through this intuitive way of presentation, the audience will reflect on the neglected thoughts contained in the three-dimensional images as landscape architecture.
This project originates from the analysis of people's ability to read pictures. Presented in the form of mixed media, it explores the commonality between the way that people read and the way that photographic devices produce images.
The understanding of an image first starts from the information that one sees on the surface of the image, or the sign, and then, with the association or imagination of the image, or the vision, which collectively constitute the concept of the image. The artist compares the characteristics of this process of image reading with the camera obscura in photographic equipment. Both of them function in this way: allowing the visible light to enter from outside and then processing them through internal invisible associations and programs.
The work abstracts the invisible parts and uses composite materials to actualize them. In combination with the image produced by the scanner, the work stitches together the visible and the invisible. Therefore, the work itself is an argumentation that the way we read pictures and the way photography is produced is a mix of objectivity and association.
