ying’s proposal

by ying0jiang

Since it’s a project without any specific brief, it would be a good time to do something I really want to talk about. Looking back to all the projects I’ve done, mostly they were processes I went through to study photography. What am I interested in? What things do I think about? All art contains the personal aspects of the artists. Therefore I want to start from a personal aspect. However I don’t want to talk about myself directly, for example, self-portrait. So I decided to make a work about a friend I spend most time with.

It becomes hard to talk about someone after I decide to do so, even if she is the one I’m most familiar with. The observation and the feelings that I feel to be just there and sometimes can be depicted into words aren’t very easy to be put into a photographic language.

She devotes most of her energy and interests to traditional painting. No matter how many people believe that all art after Duchamp is conceptual, she always has her own insists. Art can’t be judged as right or wrong, only insists make the work attractive. This is one of the aspects I want to talk about her, and still there are more to be said.

I decided to make a video work, to include more elements about her, like, voice, texts, the way she acts… Things about her come to my mind fitfully, destroying a narrative plot of a video. however it could be an useful way to work, collecting every short piece I pick up, selecting the most typical ones and mending them together.

She agreed to be taken a video about herself. To help me, she talks about herself. Though she would be shy to be observed by others, yet she feels comfortable to do this because she thinks that the audience she is facing is only me, and only with me could she talk about things she kept private before. While what I would choose to show is still unpredictable at this moment, maybe the work is only how I see her. However none of these matters.

Ying Jiang
JIA10312528
BAP 2