Fengjin Yu

Artist Fengjin Yu, pursued her BFA at The Art Institute of Chicago. She is originally from Hangzhou, China. Her recent project focused on exploring how digital art expresses the transformation of space, through the second interpretation of “nature” in the post-digital era.

"Second interpretation" is a re-visioning, using artwork to depict a human sensory engagement with “nature”. This "nature" is not the natural environment, instead it is rotted in human perception, I refer to this phenomenon as the “first interpretation".

The essence of my practice is to express the understanding of the "first interpretation", through art-making and research. Thereby enabling it to become the "second interpretation". This considers the internet, digital art, and the interpretation of nature, in terms of the formation of space, and the interpretations generated by ‘human’, ‘non-human’ and ‘artificial’ discourses.

insta:@fengjin_kongge

In my native culture, people often personify ‘rivers’ or ‘mountains’ and compare them to mothers, but they do not have personality, this phenomenon is that human beings, add their interpretations to the natural space, and this kind of behaviour adds illusions to the non-human space or objects. The characteristics of rhetoric arouse people's fantasy about the surrounding medium. Natural space is a surrounding medium, which maintains the existence of human beings.

The emergence of covid-19 promoted my practice in this virtual direction. The closure of public space and the travel ban made me pick up the technology of virtual modelling again. This kind of fantasy creation, divorced from reality, is very in line with my artistic concept, so I have been using digital molding, as the main media for art practice for this year.

As mentioned above, rhetoric in culture influences people's interpretation of natural space. When people describe nature, the nature expressed is not nature itself, but the nature understood and felt by the human brain. I call this phenomenon ‘the first interpretation’. This series of works describes ‘human feelings towards nature’, through the interdisciplinary practice of digital art. The essence of this creation is to express the understanding of ‘the first interpretation’ through art practice, so I call it "the second interpretation". In this series of sculpture works, I try to use virtual technology to practice "interpretation of natural illusion".

Latourian's believes that it is difficult to separate nature from culture, ‘because in our era so many entities are hybrids, made up of both human and non-human entities.’ Even though the word "nature" is polysemous and full of semantic burden, the non-human space of nature has been in the process of human remodelling. Especially since the industrial revolution, the shaping of non-human space by human beings has been separated from the natural environment itself. When the natural space is described, there is a distance between description and nature itself. Through the reproduction and elaboration, the nature is no longer the real nature, but becomes a kind of fantasy existence.

LANDSCAPE

LANDSCAPE_version_2

In this environment, the laws of physics, and the common sense of nature in the real world are not adopted. These sculptures are built-up by abstract objects and rendered by material of organic texture. This can be regarded as a completely independent and fictional environment of the real material world. In this fictional context, the phenomena that are abnormal to the real world are created, and at the same time, it has its own laws and alternative ways.

Although I call it a "completely independent environment", my own understanding of materials and objects is still based on my understanding of the real world. The "natural environment" I recreated seems to be new, but in fact, it is not a "virtual environment". It is an environment reconstructed after interpretation. It's still based on the existing "natural environment" through human thinking and understanding. It is rooted in the human cognition of space.