We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Yoka (yujia) Gong a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Yoka (Yujia) thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. When did you first know you wanted to pursue a creative/artistic path professionally?

I tried to think back from the beginning of how I started doing art. The Arch of Hysteria made by Louise Bourgeois was the piece that dragged me in. Back then, I knew nothing about Louise Bourgeois when I saw the piece hanging in the middle of the gallery with a high ceiling. It is quiet but powerful, calm but intense. Those complex feelings root both in me and the sculpture. It feels like those emotions are trying their best to stay inside this bronze figure, but the tension that is created by the pose and the only string that keeps everything still explodes. I cried in that room, at that moment, with a feeling that something collapsed inside of me. I think it’s not just because the piece itself is amazing but also those paradoxical feelings that attacked me made me feel overwhelmed. This feeling has been lingering in my heart, giving me the urge to express my emotions and experiences through some form of medium. Perhaps this was the very beginning of my journey into the arts.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I’m a visual storyteller, always finding ‘new’ narratives in everyday life. My work is about transforming, collaborating, rearranging, and manipulating ordinary objects into unfamiliar and unveiling new forms. I enjoy making connections among the objects and people surrounding me. To me, it is a means of discovery in which I navigate and interpret the world and myself.

Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?

At what point in your work do you feel that you’ve zoomed in enough and no longer want to go further?

This was the question I asked my friend who is an artist as well. He was using the same method, zooming in, as mine to create his piece. We both hesitated to the question and no one knew the answer.

Since then, I have been thinking about this question again and again. That threshold is the key point I am eager to find out in my work. I tried to figure out the journey which brought me here by making my own map where some connections showed up:
……
Order & disorder,
Meaningful & meaningless,
Abstract & concrete,
Cognition & Intuition,
Zoom in & Zoom out.
……
There are many “&” here. The things that I am focusing on seem opposite but at the same time they can coexist. Moreover, I realize the way I put them together by using “and” rather than “versus” already builds that connection.

The concept of my latest piece, Hide and Seek, is like a hint for the audience to engage with it. Meanwhile it’s also a question for me and a methodology of how I create this piece. How much information I want to hide from the original picture which is the only resource of this video and how much I can actually hide in there? What is the audience’s connection with this piece with limited information but a welcoming environment? Would I break everything that builds in this piece after showing the original picture? Do I want that flatness people might get from revealing the “truth”? The image which is the main resource represents a frozen moment, a moment has been paused. After I deconstructed it into pieces, I rearranged them into a new narrative. Guiding the audience to view that window I am looking at every single day by creating a movement in the video. The space where I present also brings a conflictive view of being inside and outside. I am playing with that 2 dimensional photo and blend my complex feeling into the space and the movement, throwing the paradoxical feelings to my audience which might bring questions.

From those dialogues between me and the piece, the audience and the piece, me and the audience, I feel something has been formed, which I am not sure what it is. But there is one thing that I started to think about —- Maybe I am the “&”. I’m the one who is finding the threshold between those contradictory elements and linking them together. I’m the one who is crossing the border line that separates both sides. I am the one who is going through the three phases of liminality while I’m in this “&” journey. And the threshold is within me. Finding that key point is my own journey before and while I’m creating something. It’s not about how the audience thinks but needs me to define, which can bring the power to the piece and express that “&” feeling to my audience.

Maybe this is the thing that has been formed—-Me being a tunnel to transfer the tension from my experience, and bounce it back to my audience. Those confusion and frustration kept pushing me to open my boundaries to accept more things that never were in my life before. I can feel the huge gap between me and the unknown but I also feel close to it. I’m glad my resilience brings me here, to a stage where I can start to think about my work in a new perspective. Even though it might take a long time for me to answer all these questions, I feel more confident about the future possibilities by accepting all the feelings and understanding that occurred during my whole journey in art and life.

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

Constantly asking yourself questions while accepting that finding the answers takes time will keep you moving forward.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://yokagong.me
• Instagram: @yokagong.me
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/yujia-gong-42a560300