We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Yang Wei Han a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Yang Wei Han, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. We’d love to hear about when you first realized that you wanted to pursue a creative path professionally.

I spent four years getting an undergraduate degree in journalism. The working pattern of journalism did not fit me well. The industry is all about time sensitivity. It upset me to think that a report I write will never be read a week after it is published. I had this simple wish that I could have the freedom to create things that express, or represent myself and last longer. It was my third year in the university that I started to think seriously about making art as (potentially) a career. Thanks to the photojournalism class I had taken before, I knew a little about digital photography, and I wanted to learn photography under the fine art discourse. A friend next to my dorm happened to know a professor of the photography department. I asked him if I could audit his class, and he said you are welcome. That is how everything started.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

I always feel that life is mundane on the surface, but it unfolds its significance if you look at it carefully and contemplate it. In my pictures, I recreate seemingly ordinary events of everyday life that often reveal their complex meanings not in the moment, but later in remembrance. For an event like this, it hardly occurred to me to photograph it the moment it happened, and we can never predict when it will happen next time. It cannot be captured, but in a way can be reconstructed.

To take some examples: Untitled (Seated Man) depicts a man who, on a whim, wants to be naked in nature, but suddenly feels reluctant to even put his feet onto the ground because he thinks it is dirty. It is a moment when the civilized and the animal side collide within a human being. In Identifying the Plant, a woman is crouching down to identify a plant. Yet her delicate dressing and the unremarkable surroundings, together with the lush violet and the inconspicuous weed being identified, imply something more. My recent work, Untitled (Basketball Shooting), shows a man doing basketball shooting without a real ball in an ordinary neighborhood. The action that is born with a specific goal turns into a purposeless, habitual behavior. On the contrary, his girlfriend (or not) walks naturally a little ahead, detached from his enjoyment. These pictures are all originated from my own experience. I love to make them into real photographs where time is suspended but narrations and interpretations are opened up.

What do you find most rewarding about being a creative?

Being an artist means you will have more freedom in managing your time and business. It is like a double-edged sword. You may have to worry about how to pay the rent next month (sometimes this worry can last long), but for me, the best thing is that you can be fully engaged with what you are interested in, continuously create and make progress. It is a path where you will frequently have to have conversations with yourself.

Have any books or other resources had a big impact on you?

I don’t think there is a specific, most significant one…but I do read a lot for enjoyment. I remember in high school, I sometimes would skip the assignment class and read some ancient Chinese essays and poems. I guess those (in particular words by the Hundred Schools of Thought) might somehow influence my way of thinking. Recently I started to read them again. I also love works by Marcel Proust, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Borges…In a word, I think artists can get inspired by what they really enjoy, and to me, reading is one of them.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.yangweihan.com
• Instagram: @yang__weihan