Can Yang

The post-modernist idea of deconstruction and reformation appear in most of my works. By reassessing the specificity and transformations across media, my idea is to grow complexities through enhancing the vividness and richness of layers and meaning outside of the grand narratives.

Digital media emerge as the apparent endpoint of an accelerating dematerialism. Most of the discussions about art in the digital age have affirmed that there is a progressive decay of aura in the process of reproduction and recreation of the original work (Walter Benjamin, 1935). However, there is also a variety of reasons beyond staging of criticism to work in the field of digital medium: the special feature of fusing time and space, past and future, self and audience presents a ‘fugitiveness’ that refuses the categorical and totalising inscription.

Based on theoretical research and practical experiments, I started to form a series of experimental works, questioning this doctrine. 

"We are all lichens now!" (Scott Gilbert) And according to Donna Haraway, symbiosis is particular mode of "being-" and "becoming-with." Within and beyond the field biosocialogy, a lichenoid concept would deepen our understanding of human nature and our relationships to the complex visible and invisible collectives in ancient myths and speculative imagination. How do we conceptualise plural beings and trace the clues of inevitable transformation through conceptualising, assembling and modelling? 

The sculptural installation is developed as an assemblage of beings, in 3-dimensional form of images and signs. Its narrative explores myths, science fiction imagination and futurological uncertainty. Each sculptural system reflects a proposition for non-human-centred model with no single narrative and no single truth.

Neobridge is a speculative hypothesis of structuring new forms of practice through integrating layers and hybridising discursive polysemiotic dimensions. In building this model of art practice, which serves as a linkage from artist to artwork and artwork to audience, my research is centred in promoting two values: multi-dimensionality and complexity.

1. A Multi-dimensional Observation: A Neobridging approach to criticism involves discovering, recognising and understanding the higher dimensions—the unseen, underlying, unspoken and implicit assumptions, ideas and frameworks of cultural forms.

2. A Complex Process: In comparison to the linear way of transferring message from artist through art work to the audience, the Neobridge model aims to deconstruct the determinacy and primacy of the work of art, that a linear thinking process of visual representation could be alternatively substituted with net-like discursive “bridges”.

Standing at the point which supports a preference for fragmentation over unity, dispersion over linear order, this model raises the question—in the contemporary art practice, how to transmit cognitive and sensory information across media and to dissolve the boundaries between genre, media and context?

Within my experimental projects, the starting points are always from a fascination of multisensoriality, affective politics of perception and material reconsiderations of place, relation, temporality and memory. I like to pursue intra-actions between movement and thought, creative practice and new materialist theory-making, ethics and politics. The multimodal material input provides a point of departure from which personal and collective memories and histories are highlighted. It concerns matters such as the memory of a material, the journey of a material between different time or space, and the adaptation of a material performed within different context and read by different audience that could produce further meanings.

Decontextualisation is typographic experiment using hand-cut forms to compose letters while using the scraps/throwaways/negative forms to compose another version of the lettering. (i.e. A and A’) Letters are the components to form text and meaning but interestingly during the visual communication process letters could also be iconoclastic by their non-referentiality—they are pictorial forms which are detached from the meaning. The newly-formed unreadable alphabets (A’s) stand on their own in the foreground and while decoding the content and form a language that separates itself from the authorised meaning. Form becomes the content.

Form-Bridging is an on-going experimental process in deepening and defining the Neobridge Model. It aims to address the new forms of art practice through the journey of form-making and deconstruction of text, which take the form-making as a visual tool.

Form-Bridging is just a collection of ambiguous undefined clusters which have been produced when in doubt produce them out. It is an ongoing list of implicit things that have been spoken out but doesn’t really say anything. It goes beyond linguistic taxonomy and solidity of retelling or translation. Meaning is situational and unstable, it can be altered, negated or collapse on its own.

Form-bridging workshop is an experiment to break the primacy and dominancy of both artist and artwork, by seeing the importance of relationship and relative forces as a method to break through the limitations of the self but form a desire to neutralise the position of narrator or speaker into a reflective space. The workshop series1 that took place on April 23rd was a collaborative drawing exercise, with participants will be required to bring in their own tool (could be either physical or digital) to create forms based on the observation of each other’s form-making process during the workshop. 

The second series will be taking place on 10:30-11:30 AM (BST) June 27th during RCA satellite event at Ugly Duck.