Jingye Yao is a visual communicator and designer based in London and Shanghai focussing on experimental film making and narrative image-making. She is also a collector, sightseer, observer and puzzle lover — ever curious and inspired by daily life.
Jingye Yao
My perception of the world is like putting together a boundless puzzle — fragments of memory and joy — assembled in the same scattered way.
Sometimes, I feel that I am an algorithm — arranging, adding and subtracting words, symbols and graphic images so that they may be more easily accessed. Especially in the context of the Internet, more and more symbolic graphics (comparable to hieroglyphs) have become a new language and a new punctuation. Those icons have become a method of translation, and the coexistence of imagery and abstraction explores the possibility and ambiguity of visual language.
My current work started with emoji, and led to an ongoing discussion of content, interpretation, language, narrative and typology.
Homepage — The introduction and small animation
Catalogue — Displays my diary in chronological order, which is divided into three columns, date/weather/mood, which also means that it provides this retrieval method.
Decoding — Participants can write their own translation and upload it.
Versions & Primal — The collected text and my own version of the day, which can be switched into different languages.
Emoji.Diary is an online platform established for emoji writing. Daily life is recorded in the form of graphic symbology, and the public is invited to perform a second interpretation, generating countless daily texts. This project is more of an exploration based on the potential of graphic language in the online world. It accepts participants' differing imaginations and understandings of emojis, both concretely and abstractly.
In essence this is an act of translation, from limited to infinite, like narrating a text in a hundred ways. As argued by Schleiermacher, the translator leaves the author in peace, as much as possible, and moves the reader towards him. So when I regard these emoji-based texts as an act of translation, I hope to preserve the personalities of all participants and their identities. Hence it becomes an experiment in cross-cultural communication in addition to a means of (re)telling stories in a different linguistic register; moreover, translation is the application of cultural literacy of both a text’ s original context and its new sphere of reception.
Medium:
website
This is a continuous collection project and publication. It’s what I have been doing for a long time: taking photos corresponding to emojis and sorting them.
The book itself is completely composed of images and emojis, it does not have a title or word that can be textualised. Instead, I used a symbol commonly know as a ‘question mark box’ and typically used to represent missing characters, alluding to what is inside the box