Ellen Yi Wang(An Su)

-To know that a dark, cosmic-cast wind can, on occasion, smooth itself to stillness, just there at a window ledge, just there at our fingertips.

From Elegy To Seeds is a composition photography project of gender, space, nature and myth with literary metaphor and manipulation of self-restraint. Within the limitations of photography, this series attempts to explore the relationship between poetics, psychoanalysis and metaphor.

The divergent ambivalence; metaphor of unconscious; fear and suppression of trauma echo the inner identity vitality, triggering meditation on spirituality, trace and time. The fragmentary female body, the transcendental experience, inspire a gentle contradiction, representing a container that can swallow and absorb the consciousness of a moment.

The things which the magician recommends to be kept separate are those which, by reason of their characteristic properties, cannot be brought together and confused without danger..useful maxims, the first forms of hygienic and medical interdictions.

-Golden Bough The Elementary of Religious Life 1912; Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo By Professor Mary Douglas

The Distant Mountains narrates a strife grown between shame, love, and sin. My aunt's HIV caused the sensitive changes in my family, which made me reflect on the trauma connected with the political struggles and contradictions in family history. This film is intertwined HIV metaphors under gender attributes, Postmemory and generational trauma, presenting memory and emotion poetically in fragile and sensitive harmony with the combination of archives, hometown, memory and words, which extends to stigma and social prejudice, and brings into the cause and effect between Chinese history background with family, political and individual survival.

When the COVID-19 swept up the world in 2020, I was working with the government on social research on ethnic culture in Tibet. In the process, I learned that the pigments used in Thangka Buddhist paintings are extracted and ground from minerals to avoid climate erosion, which Inspired me to make Cyanotype papers and went to the main rivers and lakes on the plateau to directly contact the minerals, ice stains and salts under the water with photosensitive materials. The process more directly reflects time and details of the natural movement and conditions ignored by eyes.

I remember the moments when I put the papers in the water.

Water holds images; yet, water is impossible to hold.

laundering, swallowing, frowning, dissolving, floating.

The useless dawn finds me in a deserted street corner; I have outlived the night. 

Nights are proud waves; darkblue topheavy waves laden with all the hues of deep soil, laden with things unlikely and desirable. 

Nights have a habit of mysterious gifts and refusals, of things half given away, half withheld, of joys with a dark hemisphere. Nights act that way, I tell you. The surge, that night, left me the customary shreds and odd ends: some hated friends to chat with, music for dreams, and the smoking of bitter ashes. The things my hungry heart has no use for. 

The big wave brought you. 

Words, any words, your laughter; and you so lazily and incessantly beautiful. We talked and you have forgotten the words.

- Jorge Luis Borges

please contact for print enquiries.