We were lucky to catch up with Jingyao Shao recently and have shared our conversation below.

Jingyao , thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today What’s been the most meaningful project you’ve worked on?

Rewind is a series of intimate and evocative revisitings of preserved family memories, while reconciling with the identity and relationships with loved ones. The performance uses tape and custom-made electronics to explore the entangled relationship between self and familyhood through memory. 9 VHS tapes serve as handles to revisit personal family memories recombining visuals and sounds in them. The sounds, collected from the old home video footages, were a mix of ambient environment sound, family conversations over gatherings, and recordings from celebrations, which were significant snippets of memory around personal identity and family rituals. Most of the video footages were recorded about 15 years ago, and functioned as a very important part when constructing own culture identity and emotional attachments in my early stage of the life, and now diasporic ties. These footages were reversed into analog format and manipulated by analog circuit bending processors, as well as collapsed in real-time digitally with data bending algorithm. Arranging and confronting the fragments of the past, I was searching for a sense of place and belonging in the lost memories, and in the part of me that was left in that distant small town.

Jingyao , love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

I’m a Chinese new media artist currently based in Brooklyn, and often work with installations, sound, performances, and research. As a memory archiver, I conscientiously examine the retrieval and morphosis of what has been left in the past, and plants it in new mediums through my practices. In my cultivation, I weave invisible threads to the people at the space, lingering and drifting between the anechoic chamber of perceptions and the net of resonance encounters. Oftentimes, I also attempt to navigate with the blurry renderings of glitches on culture and gender, both looking backwards at cultural nostalgia and forward to the future bodies.

What do you think is the goal or mission that drives your creative journey?

As an artist and researcher, I intend to employ art as a medium and a way to contribute to knowledge creation. Coming from a background in psychology, I was fascinated in the scientific process of probing how people’s mind work. Media art allows me to interpret the world with intuitive feelings and sensory imagery. Embracing the detachment and objectivity from the scientific and technical paradigm top with the care and attention from media art practices, I wish to integrate them together to fulfill my awareness and responsibility to the world.

Looking back, are there any resources you wish you knew about earlier in your creative journey?

Having support from friends and also being able to support for their art practices are the mostly grateful things to happen :)

Contact Info:

• Website: www.jingyaoshao.com

Image Credits
Last two image credits: Viola He