Featured Artist
Emily Fan Yang

“In this project, I explore the possibility of placing images in different contexts to alternate the viewer’s perspective and expand the image’s reading. Photography is the process of looking. The presence of the camera is the viewpoint of the artist to the subject. Viewers have their own reading of images with their background and life experiences”. Emily Fan Yang’s practice centres on photography to show the pervasive nature of ambiguity and liminality in human life. In her photographic projects, she presents the liminal stage in the body, image-making, and social change.

“Photography is a medium that can be open to multiple interpretations by viewers. I am interested in this ambiguity inherent in photography, which can be used to question and take advantage of at the same time. I use photography to express my interest in the liminal state, or the uncertain status, of human beings. The liminal state is a period of transition between two phases of life or between two states of consciousness”.

“My first photo project Liquify (2015-2017) showcases the existence of non-binary groups and alters the perspective of conventional narratives. I provoke our ways of seeing and being seen. Through this project, I also explored how narrative can recover meaning from uncertainty, and the relationship between the object and the image in photography. Jump Cut (2017-2028) challenge the storytelling power of a single image. I also utilize the limits of photography to explore the narrative potential of groups of images. I staged teenage females and the fragments of daily life in the studio setting. The narrative is generated by the group of images because it achieves two key components of an event the passage of time and the alternation of perspective”.

“Project Jet Lag Disorder first started in the summer of 2017. With the experience of the worldwide rise of populism and COVID-19, we are so far from the era when different regions of people embraced each other mentally and physically. The project is my reflection and meditation amid vast surrounding unrest, it questions where will we be. Magical Realism in literature and film is a big influence to me. I found huge similarities between Magical Realism and photography both of them are based in the real world, and they express authenticity through the author’s sensibility and imagination. The idea that I can show a world beyond reality directly through camera always intrigues me”.

more. www.emfanyang.com