Yiran Wang

Yiran Wang is a visual journalist. As a teenager, she constantly moved from city to city, culture to culture. Then as an adult, she traveled and worked in many countries. Naturally, instead of her geological origin, personal memories and experiences became her root. She also navigates across academic boundaries. Her former education is a combination of languages, politics and business.

While frequently cast into a new environment, from time to time, she feels alienated from her new surroundings and her hometown as well. The tension between her feelings and the collective narrative fuels her interest in the neglected personal voices and the feeling of otherness in daily life. Her works are based on oral interviews, archival research, and field studies, which encourage the viewers to look at daily life with a stranger’s eye.

I’m not used to being defined by my discipline, my practices, the forms of my works, or my favoured materials and techniques. They are all to be played with for the interest of my content. And my content doesn’t tell but listens.

You may imagine me working closely with communities to trigger conversations but I work the other way around. All we need is to leave the room for the conversations to happen and to be heard as we create the noise called me. So enjoy the distance and inclusiveness created by my content.

You are invited, accompanied by me, the silent author, into a space where the Other’s narration can be heard. The space, often named project by other artists, holds my search for authenticity, a shared consensus that can be distorted both socially and individually.

Launch Project

Click, Watch, Listen

Here, a human story is shown as ‘an act of listening’, where personal memories of a devastating social movement are revealed through family conversations. Those memories of that turbulent time, although always lingering around the family's everyday life, remain covered up by a collective narrative, a correct one, an official one.

And history echoes the present. When the pandemic hit London, Beijing declared the national lockdown lifted. But ever since, the Chinese government has received international accusations. In response, the authority urges the public to 'form a correct collective narrative.' The government's earlier failures turned into a taboo. The personal losses are veiled by the collective victory, just as it has always been in all human history.

Medium:

Film, Digital

Size:

00:10:42

This is an experiment in reconstructing the story with extracts from the film. Does it reflect the original narration or create a new storyline? How far or close are the fragmented personal memories to reality? It’s like hearing echoes- hard to say whether an echo is an authentic copy of the original sound. But if not, what is real then?

Medium:

Digital

Digital imagery Drawing Empathy Experimental fragmented humans Illustration interviews Memory Narration / Storytelling Narrative Non-fiction

Yiran Wang

Medium:

Size:

Medium:

Social

About

Royal College of Art