? Yishu Wang ?

Yishu Wang is a recent graduate from Goldsmiths MFA Fine Art in 2023. With a BFA training in oil painting from China Academy of Art. Working as a multidisciplinary artist, Yishu works with painting/sketching, creative writing, and digital art - sometimes all at once. Haunted by the feeling of displacement both inside and outside homeland, she questions the identity of new Chinese diaspora and the inherited notion of the loss of sense of belonging. Her way of raising and answering is filling the canvas with endless figures and words. Main figures in her work are mostly people she met in her life, people with shared experience in different aspects. “Face is the index of heart”, says an old idiom from China, faces give hints to a human’s life. The way their faces look, how they put on makeups, how they dress themselves, each detail tells a part of their story, which always attracts her deeply. By breaking and recombining the common part of mundane, she re-enters the daily life with a slightly quirky appearance in her works, infused with emotions, questions and self-reflection. By chewing on these small hints, she grows the habit of constantly rediscovering our infra-ordinary quotidian. The ongoing project Portray and Write is a painting + talking practice where she invites her queer Chinese friends she met since 2021 when she first moved to London. One by one she sits with them for a 5ish hour’s life portrait session, where they talk at the same time exchanging their life experiences as young Chinese diaspora and the same challenges they face from a daily basis as a transnational being. These sessions are almost therapeutic, providing both sides a focused time to see themselves and each other, resonate and heal. Create writing is another essential part of her practice, sometimes they are independent poetry work, sometimes the words are merged into her figurative drawings/paintings, or even the titles and descriptions of the work. But no matter what flows out of her hand, Yishu sees herself always and forever a painter and 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 her, they are the same flow of mind, driven by endless thirst to express. The method of creating any form of work, to Yishu 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.