Ziyi Yang is a Chinese artist who is base on London and China. She finished her BA at Shandong University of Arts in 2017 and MA at Camberwell College of Arts London. Her paintings are about symbiosis, supernatural phenomena and animals’ perspective. She uses oil and multi materials (like clay and sand) to make different textures of her paintings, which were combined oil and mural paintings. She used animal’s perspective to put viewers at an outsider’s position to observe the human’s society and human’s mental state. These paintings usually use a lot narratives and story telling way to express her understanding about modern industry, Chinese ghosts and mysteries.
Her paintings Noah’s Ark and Weasel’s Humanisation were shown on the show ——Wang in Hackney. Dancing in the Moors was shown on the show Church/Factory in Copeland Gallery.
Now Ziyi is still continuing her exploration between nature/supernatural phenomena and art making. She’s using unique Chinese magic realism way to discuss this subtle balance between human and other existing. The content of her art is often drawn from her perception of biological magnetic fields and folktales, and she believes that these biological and non-biological forces interact to create a metaphysical connection. As Thomas Nigel discusses in his philosophical meditation "How About Being a Bat” we often implant our self-consciousness into other objects to find resonance and psychoanalyze other conscious bodies, which is understood as a kind of colonization of consciousness, and our anthropomorphism of animals is really only a reflection of human society and consciousness. When we shift our perspective to animals, it is also a kind of reverse monitoring and re-assigning meaning to human society. When people cannot explain something with science and logic, they often attribute the principle to ghosts and gods. These paintings sometimes reflect this phenomenon in a tiled way, which is also the doubting of existing theories and authority.
