We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Yuxiang Dong a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Yuxiang, appreciate you joining us today. How did you learn to do what you do? Knowing what you know now, what could you have done to speed up your learning process? What skills do you think were most essential? What obstacles stood in the way of learning more?

As an artist who work mostly with digital media, I learned my craft techniques mostly with open resources online, such as YouTube, GitHub, etc. Today, technologies both software and hardware are evolving unprecedentedly fast. Thus, the most essential skills for me are self-teaching and self-learning, how not be lost in huge amount of data. The most significant obstacle stands in the way of learning is dealing with uncertainties, not all technique skills could result in good works but may still need continuous revisions and reworks to finish the works. So, everything is uncertain; It is not always good, but sometimes it is good.

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

I am Yuxiang Dong, an artist who work mostly with photography and media art. Currently, I am based in New Jersey. Responding to the advancement of photographic and digital imaging technologies, such as virtual reality, augmented reality, facial recognition, and wearable device, my current works explore some big problems like how real and virtual world interact and how our knowledge of nature, history, and personhood are transformed. My explorations of these big problems are often originated from personal and bodily experiences with the world through basic sensory perceptions: vision, hearing, smelling …

We’d love to hear your thoughts on NFTs. (Note: this is for education/entertainment purposes only, readers should not construe this as advice)

I once purchased a NFT art launched by Australian Open. I really like the idea that unique pieces of generative art links directly to live match data. For example, you can collect a 3D tennis ball that was a ball of game point. However, my collected AO Art Ball NFT was stolen because I am scammed by a phishing email. Thus, I see a lot of potentials of NTF, blockchain, metaverse for creativity. But at the same time, they are not utopia since potential risks also exist.

What do you find most rewarding about being a creative?

The life as an artist is full of new encounters and surprise. Opportunities like exhibitions and residencies always bring me to places and people that I can never expect. I really enjoy and appreciate this kind of new encounters that give me very different life experiences. This is definitely the most rewarding aspect of being an artist.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.yuxiangdong.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/yuxiang_dong/