Yifan Jiang
Columbia
2021
There is something strange about walking around and being human. We use mouthy movements to talk to each other, to eat, to get to the moon, to sing, and to kill each other. Chairs are shaped like butts. There are billions and billions of butt-shaped objects across the globe.
Born in Tianjin, China, Yifan Jiang is a Canadian artist based in NYC. Jiang is a conceptually driven, project-based artist who works across painting, animation, sculpture, and performance. Drawing on strategies of pataphysics and magical realism, she creates images and narratives by weaving together personal, everyday experiences with idioms of philosophy, history, and science. Taking an irreverent approach to epistemology, Jiang considers the multitude of sentiments (meaninglessness, happiness, humility, wonder…) of a human being thinking about being in the world.
One Sunday Morning
2:27min excerpt of 13:12 min Animation, 2021.
Oil on paper, Adobe after effects, Adobe Premiere, Photoshop, touch designer.
The story begins with humanity’s sudden loss of language on one unsuspecting Sunday morning. Told from the perspective of two protagonists originating from opposite sides of the world, the Fable-Esque tale is a thought experiment exploring the limits of language and human empathy.