Ziyi (Kaylyn) Hua

Influenced by Fred Moten and Stefano Harney's idea of 'hapticality,' under-common materialism, and Karen Barad's quantum field theories, Kaylyn's works usually involve an agency to emulate the essence of photographic reality or counter the formally recognized truth.

My name is Kaylyn/Ziyi Hua. I'm a multidisciplinary Chinese artist/designer.

I studied consumer behaviour and visual art for my undergraduate studies in Canada. I am passionate about discovering voices from marginalized communities and vulnerable individuals. I believe in the importance of avoiding misrepresentation and promoting multidimensional communication. My works primarily look for speculative positions to reimagine and reconsider different possibilities in current feminist studies and in addressing the challenges of consumer culture, issues of sustainability and post-colonialism in society.

— My original motive came from my personal confusion towards human interaction and my younger sister who got diagnosed with ADHD and struggled to get a confirmed medical diagnosis with ASD in China because of the limited attention built around the autism spectrum in both professional and the public sphere. The autism spectrum is usually associated with difficulty with communication and social interactions.

— 'Blushing' as a communication experiment places its emphasis more on the juxtaposition of unexpected forms of media and ways of communication.

Blushing is a form of encounter that could take place anywhere with an anxiously blushing soft-body robot. The robot is actuated by inflation and deflation of the air, programmed to move away from whoever gets close. After the encounter, the audience receives an instant-film-like greeting card that recalls a trajectory of the robot's movement.

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Resin, LED lights

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Varied.

3D model of the wood-print block

Toolkit — Full Moon contains a block-print toolkit, a transformable document folder and a thread of reversed 'film ticket.'

The Full Moon is an interactive publication toolkit to make space for memories.

In the context of the pandemic, unexpected death has started to circulate among our topics of conversation. Because of the emotional struggle and limitation of space, it's sometimes hard to find a proper way to grieve under these circumstances. One of my friends passed away this year suddenly, and I came across a piece of sound work called Full Moon during the grieving. It was from Japanese-composer Ryuichi Sakamoto, who was diagnosed with cancer twice. As he said, 'Everything happens only a certain number of times... how many times will you watch the full moon rise?...'

Would autonomously initiating poetic space for oneself be a more intimate yet sustainable way for grieving and retaining memories?

I asked.

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Paper

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Varied

Launch Project

Research Journey — This link would direct you to my research journey website, explaining each phase of my 7-month research on construction workers, as well as some of the historical and political significance of female labour forces. The research journey includes outcomes from informal street interviews and a monitored interview/field visit with one of the largest construction companies in China.

Layout of the App — The goal is to make a road lamp installation(online and offline) that could interact with the audience while collecting audiences' feedback about this issue and making the invisible visible in the local community.

The Inexistent Roadmap is a research-oriented project, reflecting on a dilemma of double-invisibility in Chinese female labour issues.

The project consists of 2 parts: The first part is interactive typography that responds to the physical movements of the audience, also shifting the shape accordingly.

The second part is a virtual space where the audience can access my research journey (both primary and secondary research), which could potentially become an app allowing audiences to contribute their feedback and explore other people’s input in a forum-like space.

— Firstly, I asked my samples to send me back a list of their detailed plastic consumption record with images; also, they need to specify the time and location of the use. Then I visualized data into a series of cell-like animated circular shapes. The Radius shows the absolute value of the sample's travel distance from home, whereas the speed of movement indicates the sample's frequency of plastic consumption in a day.

— This research method was inspired by the Spatiotemporal dynamics of molecular pathology, a newly developed method implied in medical studies. I found this method interesting because it understands RNA as a 'time-machine,' each part has information to determine what and when particular events would take place in our body.

— My initial motive for this work was from a friend's complaint on struggling to make her colleagues in Shanghai realize that protecting the environment is not a western idea but a global issue. However, halfway working on research I was going to conduct in the office space, I realized people who would participate would be a similar demographic as the environmentally-conscious individuals struggling in the first place. So it becomes a paradoxical situation.

— I was hoping to expand my scope related to environmental issues on theoretical side, so I started to read material feminist theories. Karen Barad and Alaimo pointed out a way of seeing the body as material. In their discussion about human and non-human, I found they stressed the focus on 'human and non-human flesh.' Online consumption has become increasingly significant in the consumer cycle in the pandemic situation. I wonder would this theory still be relevant? How do you define 'flesh' in 2021?

— The final moving image would be auctioned at a NFT auction site. To recast political power as trans-corporeal space. *NFT stands for 'non-fungible token'. A unit of data stored on a digital ledger, called a blockchain, that certifies a digital asset to be unique and therefore not interchangeable.

Matt is a merged identity constituted by a spectrum of samples with different occupations, age groups, sexual orientations and current based locations. From students to lawyers, doctors to real estate agents located in Melbourne/Shanghai/ Toronto and other cities worldwide. Naked Matt is a data visualisation based on their plastic consumption patterns.

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Data

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Varied

Ziyi (Kaylyn) Hua

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About

Royal College of Art