Originally from China and now based in London, Ziyi is a multi-media textile designer and artist who enjoys developing and enriching her collections through mixed research, integrating feminist storytelling, pattern design, material exploration, fabric printing techniques and more.
During her printed textiles MA at the Royal College of Art, her curiosity about women's voices encouraged her to experiment with many possibilities–from high-temperature techniques to storytelling.
My work uses a feminist perspective to deconstruct family space. I am interested in how the spaces we inhabit shape our daily rituals and how our behaviour, in turn, helps to pull apart the structures of our living spaces. I seek to reflect on aspects of domestic drama and personal introspection that arise from within such places.
My process is rooted in deconstruction techniques. It involves textile-making, which is then composed as spatial installations. My making process captures the feelings and associations that different rooms might evoke. Cutting and collaging, burning, and layering are qualities I have worked with to give voice to the female experience across different rooms.
The process is elaborate and time-consuming, rich in technical experiments to achieve the desired quality. The final pieces involve printing on textiles and assembling them on wooden frames to create 'memories' of rooms for viewers to respond to at any level.
Greatly inspired by Paul Klee's writings (The Thinking Eye and his notebooks), I see my work as a form of intimate storytelling:
"What is important to artist is to specify a dimension or a perspective, to recognise the limits of space and time in which one's own existence manifests itself, to reweave the weft of the universe, from the starting point of one's own ego, with its will to make or to shape".
After starting this process of creative destruction, my next step is to pursue larger-scale production and experimentation with three-dimensional illusions and effects in a more performative and ambitious manner.
