? Yishu Wang ?

Yishu Wang, b.1999, China, currently a year 2 student in Goldsmiths MFA Fine Art. I am an image maker and writer, working with painting, poetry, printing, and digital form - and sometimes all at once. Haunted by the feeling of displacement both inside and outside my homeland, I question my identity of new Chinese diaspora and the inherited notion of the sense of belonging. My way of raising and answering is filling my life with endless portraying and writing. By breaking and recombining the common life subjects, I re-enter the daily life with a slightly quirky appearance of my work, which is infused with my anger, confusion and alienation as a transnational being, tangling with the line between 2D and 3D, virtual and physical form, domestic and exterior space. The discussion in my works is always originated from my interest in the subtle differences derived from cultural backgrounds and especially language, as a bilingual. The street signs, slogans on the wall, chatting slangs via social media platforms, verbal expressions and tales, they operate us into different ways of thinking, talking and reacting without us noticing it consciously. This applies aspects outside language too, reflected in my exploration of portraiture making with digital painting and editing. “Face is the index of heart”, says an old idiom from China, faces give hints to a human’s life. The wrinkles (sometimes not from age but from habits), the glance, the angle of the curve of the mouth, how they trim their eyebrow, if their skin is more cold or warm, haircuts… they tell the story of every human. My job is to chew on these small hints, remember, and remind, leading myself and potentially my audience, into ultimately the habit to constantly rediscover in our infra-ordinary quotidian. In spite of the various materials, I see myself always and forever a painter and essentially, everything as a canvas. This is partly because of the pictographic nature of Chinese language, thus writing and sketching is not of much difference to me, they are the same flow of mind, driven by endless thirst to express. The method of creating any form of work, to me is similar to creating a painting, constantly requiring the ability to organize the chaotic information in the frame. Altering, redoing, adding on or scratching off until something concrete, something that can convince reveals itself.