EAS participating artist, Fengjin Yu, from Hangzhou, China and currently enrolled at the Royal College of Art in London, shares her Master of Art dissertation process with us, activated in the form of a growing and multi-faceted sculptural installation entitled ‘Daily Life and Fragmentation’.

This sculptural installation project attempts to explore the connections between personal life and work/research. There seems to be an apparent gap between the two, but it's always intertwined.

At present, I am preparing my dissertation. The preparation appears to be an act of fragmenting knowledge. The printed text in the exhibit  is from my bibliography.  The process of writing is like cultivating a mushroom or a plant. It takes time, patience and careful cultivation. However, what the object looks like actually depends primarily on itself rather than the cultivator.

Generally speaking, the composition of this project needs the participation of time and space, and “time” and “space” become part of the material. During the installation exhibition, I watered the plants and fungi in the space every day to maintain their growth. At the same time, I uploaded my research progress and inspiration to the mini-printer every day, in real-time. The core of this work is to explore and discuss “process” and “progress”.

Printer paper grows every day during the exhibition, like growing plants and fungi.  The content of the text is like a plant growing, and my personal feedback on the reading material is like a mushroom growing up. They all produce a meaningful, meaningless and/or redundant volume with the change of time. There is also an intense entanglement between words and art. 

It is effortless for people to hide themselves when writing.  Through certain writing techniques or text guidance, readers can easily be misled into thinking that the author is what the author wants them to see; when, in fact, the author may be different. However, when creating art it is very difficult for the creator to hide themself. Even if the work is not related to personal issues, the audience can also feel the real state of the artist.

In this project, I tried to experiment by combining the two,  using the text and the text content as material that becomes a part of the work. By combining text with plants and printers in the exhibition space, their independent existence constitutes a spatial unity. Through the coordination of these materials, I was able to create a complete time-space process.

Treating my work as a process or part of a progression, I tried to give this project its own possibility, and also to artificially increase that possibility.

ARTWORK
Media: fungi bag, wood, paper, Polyester fabric, cotton    |    Size: Multiple sizes

Fengjin Yu is an artist pursuing her MA at Royal College of Art in London. She received her BFA degree from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is originally from Hangzhou, China. In the beginning Fengjin’s sculptures and paintings employed the human figure in an effort to express a variety of human emotions, mainly those that arise from conflict. In college, she changed her focus to the interaction between sculpture and audience.