Chenwei Yu

Chenwei is a jewellery artist from China. After graduating from the Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing, in 2020 with a degree in Jewellery Design, she went on to study Jewellery and Metal at the Royal College of Art. Her inspiration mostly comes from personal experiences or hidden emotions. She focuses on intimate relationships and emotional expressions between people and society. As a sensitive, but not chatty, person, she embodies her inner world in her jewellery and reflects on herself in her practice. Chenwei's works have been exhibited in both China and the UK.

The series entitled Infinite Loop is a reflection and exploration of the increasingly common phenomenon of internal conflict among contemporary young people.

Internal conflict is involved ongoing ego battles within the mind and body that individuals experience as a result of attentional biases, troubled thinking, and conflicting feelings and reasoning. It manifests itself mainly as hesitation and confusion when doing things, with thoughts flying around, self-denial and other phenomena. It is a manifestation of overthinking and hypersensitivity, which causes a significant drain on mental resources such as attention, self-control and memory. Internal conflict cycles through the brain like a vortex on the daily basis, causing people to fall into a deep internal dilemma.

In Greek mythology, Sisyphus’s punishment for trying to cheat death was to push a huge stone to the top of a mountain; every time Sisyphus failed to reach the top with the stone, and it rolled back down again, so he had to keep doing this repeatedly, without end. His life was slowly consumed in this ineffective labour. Some see him as a tragic symbol: a man who spent his life doing pointless work. However, Sisyphus bravely accepted his fate and found his strong inner strength to fight against it during his suffering, thus transcending it. Chenwei uses the myth of Sisyphus as the context and visual inspiration for her work, using myth as a metaphor for reality by making internal conflict the central theme.

Based on the process and stages of internal conflict, she has divided the work into four sections: the overthinking in the head, the quarrel in the ears, the chaos in the heart and the final rebirth.

As someone who suffers from internal conflict herself, Chenwei also reflected on her inner self during this practice. She hopes that it will resonate with people who are going through similar experiences, so that they can also face these complex emotions positively and find a way to make peace with them. She would also like to urge people to understand the psychological activity of internal conflict and to pay more attention to the psychological problems of young people.