We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Yiran Wang a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Yiran, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. We’d love to hear about a project that you’ve worked on that’s meant a lot to you.
Throughout my graduate journey, I have developed a series of three artworks centered around a core concept: exploring the nature of pain. TITLED is an installation project about Emotion Studies that delves into the figurative expression of negative emotions experienced by human beings. Through the abstract representation and mechanization of gestures such as poking and squeezing using paper and motors, my intention is to unveil the fragility and irreversibility inherent in both paper and human emotions, drawing a metaphorical connection between the two.
Describing negative emotions and feelings proves to be a challenging task. What defines depression? How can one articulate numbness or hopelessness? Expressing these abstract feelings is often difficult, as our understanding of human emotions remains incomplete. Paradoxically, this lack of comprehension is an intrinsic aspect of our humanity. Painful experiences tend to linger more prominently in our memories than joyous ones. Our amygdala aids in encoding the details of when, where, and how these experiences occurred, as well as the associated emotions. Emotional distress often accumulates, negatively impacting an individual’s life and sometimes becoming a permanent and incurable state.
The pain explored in this series is not confined to a physical body part; rather, it is the subjective experience of a human being. Pain is an intimate and personal facet, inaccessible to others in its entirety. However, our perception of the external environment sometimes acts as a trigger, resurrecting memories of past painful experiences and emotions from the depths of our subconscious. Hence, as an artist, I strive to simulate the influence of the external environment on our bodily sensations through the actions of the machine on paper, employing it as a method of emotional evocation.
My journey with this series began by revisiting the agonizing moments of my high school years. For me, pain represents the most authentic and tangible sensation, and expressing this pain through artwork becomes a process of healing, self-discovery, and a means of communication. I am captivated by the interconnectedness of human emotions, kinetic systems, and physical materials. To explore this fascination, I have experimented with diverse media, including video, installation, and sound performances revolving around this central theme. In “Titled,” my project takes the form of “Emotional Studies,” focusing specifically on the symbolic expression of negative emotions. By abstracting and mechanizing gestures such as poking, circulating, and squeezing, utilizing paper and motors, I aim to unveil the inherent fragility and irreversibility of paper as a metaphor for human emotions.
Yiran, 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?
Yiran Wang(b.1998) is a Chinese artist and designer based in New York. She is currently working as a technical artist at The Mill New York, working on Motion Capture, virtual production(virtual character), and interactive experiences.
Yiran’s artistic creations are highly subjective and empirical, drawing inspiration from her personal experiences, daily actions, and reflections. Her installations combine the physicality of common materials, constructing material and emotional connections through mechanical dynamics systems and exploring the interpenetration of human consciousness and collective experience. Besides, she likes to use sound as the main medium to explore objects, natural movement, and physical laws, interpreting the most basic movement and energy of matter through romantic and meditative sound interactions. These works express the tension between a certain systematic structural order in modernism and the unpredictability of the results. She translates her private emotional experiences into a poeticized common expression using different mediums. In the reception of the viewer, the work itself is disintegrated and reconstructed by its private experience, internalized into the viewer’s own emotional experience and memories.
Yiran received her Bachelor’s degree in Oil Painting in 2020 and recently received her Master’s degree from New York University’s Tisch Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP). She has performed at NYC Electroacoustic Improvisation Summit, MOCO 22’ Conference in Chicago, and NIME at NYU. Her works have been shown in Currents New Media 2023 in Santa Fe, The IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Art Gallery 2023 in Vancouver, HOT`BED Gallery in Philadelphia, Culture-hub Re-fest 2022, Art Number 23, and Brownie/Project in Shanghai, among others.
What’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative in your experience?
My creations always revolve around my own story. By engaging in the process of creation, and reflecting on my past experiences and emotions, I gain a deeper understanding of myself. It enables me to recognize my own pain and failures, and contemplate how to confront them.
The practice of artistic creation nurtures my ability to engage in continuous thinking and critical analysis. I have a passion for reading and writing, as they allow me to delve into different realms of knowledge. Additionally, I am drawn to multimedia creation, as it provides an avenue to explore diverse new technologies. Discovering the intersections between various disciplines serves as a constant source of inspiration for me
How about pivoting – can you share the story of a time you’ve had to pivot?
I embarked on my journey as a painter at the age of 12, driven by a fervent dream of becoming an accomplished artist. Consequently, I enrolled in the esteemed Academy of Fine Arts to immerse myself in the world of oil painting. However, my time pursuing a painting career in college proved to be a period of profound doubt and self-confidence erosion. The rigorous adherence to traditional painting techniques stifled my ability to innovate with brushes, leaving me disheartened.
It was during a captivating talk on tech art that a revelation struck me—my perception of art had been remarkably limited. Realizing this, I made a conscious effort to break free from the confines of traditional methods and explore a multidimensional approach. Since my sophomore year, I have been pushing the boundaries, embracing multimedia creations, and forging my own unique ideas and artistic systems.
Driven by my passion for multimedia technology, I embarked on a quest to acquire a diverse skill set, delving into a multitude of software applications that not only expanded my technical prowess but also ignited my creative spark — I found the best way to express my feelings and thoughts. 
Contact Info:
- Website: https://yiranwang.art/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/marcel_wang_/
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/yiran-wang-987b351b7/
- Twitter: @MarcelWang2