
2022
2019
2020

About Me
Xinan Yang (1994, CN)
London based artist
UAL Alumni
Currently doing a Doctorate of Professional Fine Art at University of East London
2021

Artist statement
My work deconstructs photographs by painting, integrating quirky narratives that revolve around self-reflection. As a memory chain, the paintings become an intimate and personally curated mnemonic archive, raising concerns about the variability of nostalgic memory in China as a means of positioning and understanding the represented self in a globalized world.
Inquiry on practice was roaming the past memory between China family life and sheer self-existence in present selfie culture had inextricably denoted that my work proffer stories rather than theories and engaging with the self-consciousness. Distinct period tying up with profound questions on my position, value, belief, identity, and cultural background define who I am and drives me to exploit the bond between self and culture; private and public. It is based on autobiographical memory which I found them often decontaminate by the present action.
The reference photographic materials are either a family album from the 1990s in China or an endlessly shared and taken selfie through social medium platform, as a framework for memory. My painting translates the photographic moment to the fallibility of memory-making, invoking collective memory. Such as the ever-negotiable role of domestic memory complicates the perpetual photographic moment: the artist's current condition and its reflection contest between the ideology of family and the reality of family. Or qualify the ubiquitous void millennial experience that is pre-dominated by artificiality.
