Website/ Portfolio:
https://weilinyang.me/
1.
My approach to art is somewhat anthropological: I am a flâneuse in the rich lands of textile handicraft and literary writing.
Through fibre, I can explore the working properties of different materials and the structural relationships among them – from natural materials that grow locally, to found objects that are full of stories. Fibres have a day-to-day-ness about them; they are diverse, and so entwined in histories and geographies that besides their visual and physical characteristics, they also come with culturally implications.
Through working physically in and out of my new home in the countryside, I feel the coordinations between eye and hand. I feel out my approaches amid order and disorder, repetitions and variations. The creative labour is my intimate relationship with nature, as I lay out the rhythms of living, and make works and art in the coming and going of seasons.
I returned to nature, and back to animism. But my fields were not in the remote country of Brazil, nor with the deities in art history. They were on my architect friend’s construction sites, across old clutter and paper piles.
It was not the language of forms that I had known best, but rather the imaginations in writings and words, and the compositions of ink and brush in oriental calligraphy. The true intention of creating may be to compose poetry with the language of fibre, to explore the nervous systems of matter with structural order, to mend and patch abandoned objects, and to cook the distiller’s grains of life – engaging with the world of gradual decline, the world of entropy.
2.
This time I want to experiment is: paper art, bark cloth and bookbinding (although I introduced indigo dyeing when I shared it on the 13th, it was too late to talk about paper art).
Because I think paper art is very experimental and can also combine many different materials. The materiality and cultural nature of book are my personal favorites.
一、
或許像個人類學家般,漫遊、採集在纖維工藝與書寫的沃土上。
透過纖維,我可以探索材質的特性以及彼此之間的結構關係,從傳統地緣的自然素材延伸至身邊充滿故事性的現成物。纖維的多樣性、日常性、以及與歷史風土的交織的特質,讓它們不僅具有視覺上與物理上的性格,更帶有隱藏在背後的文化意涵。
透過勞動,我感受到眼與手的協調與衝突、在秩序與脫序、重複與變奏之間摸索自己的途徑。勞動是人與自然的親密關係,在季節遞嬗裡,堆疊出生活與創作的節奏。
回到自然,回到泛靈。
但我的田野場所不在遙遠的巴西,不在藝術史上的諸神,在我建築師朋友的工地,在故紙堆與舊物攤上。我最熟悉的不是造形的語言而是書寫的文字的想像,是東方的書法行路與筆墨結構。創作真正的企圖或許是用纖維的語言寫無以名狀的詩、以結構的秩序探索物質的神經系統、修補他人眼中的棄物、烹調生活的糟粕,以回應這個日漸趨疲(熵entropy)的世界。
二、
這次我比較想要實驗的部分是:紙藝、樹皮布與裝幀(雖然在13日分享時我介紹了藍染,來不及談談紙藝的部分)。
因為我覺得紙藝的創作可以容納天馬行空的實驗性,和許多異材質的結合。書籍的物質性與文化性是我個人最著迷的部分。