Maggie Yang is a Chinese visual artist currently based in London. She graduated with a degree in film, television and digital production in 2020. Her work explores a filmic visual language as an approach to narrative illustration, material identity and cultural memories. Her practice sits in a world of exploring new narrative formats, testing the boundaries of ambiguity in image making; and of attempting a revival of traditional media and crafts in a cross-disciplinary visual context. Her work is profoundly inspired by her Chinese and Kam heritage, as well as an immense curiosity towards natural history.
Maggie Yang
My practice explores narratives that are poetically crude and bizarrely curious.
I’ve always had this inconspicuous fear of digital technology. Hidden behind it was immense nostalgia and a yearning for an irretrievable slowness. It’s something I’ve always longed for: the slowness to read, to touch, to record, to tell meaningful stories about human experiences, and to record shifting landscapes and fleeting memories before they’re lost. And in that slowness my illustrative work is submerged in sensual experiences, exploring a powerfully sensuous visual language that records, retrieves and remembers. In that slowness, lies an appreciation for curiosities among mundane strangeness.
The Publication
Diptych is an illustrative project that retrieves subtle and ambiguous moments in a collective past, where rapid urban changes and melancholic stillness were embodied by encounters with domestic wildlife. It examines relationships with the glimpse of nature in my urban upbringing and an irretrievable slowness that manifested in an analogue domestic life. With a series of observations on sensuous experience, slowness and mundane strangeness, the stories explore naturalism and realism in image making as an indulgence to surreal daydreams.
'Aquarium' and 'Aviary' are originally two of four stories written in a series called The Marketplace of Flowers, Birds, Fishes and Bugs which Diptych eventually morphed from. The marketplace of flowers, birds, fishes and bugs (plants and critters) is considered a heritage site of Chinese critter-keeping culture. I had plenty of fond memories frequenting them in my childhood. I examined them as a core inspiration for my practice: the fundamental place where I became immensely intrigued by natural history. In recent years most of these sites have been shut down due to violations of building regulations, which didn’t come to me as a surprise. Yet I recounted the sorrowful moments in my relationship with past critters and was left in utter perplexity.
The printed publication –
This printed publication is an edition of the original the Molecatcher’s Emblems, the unique one-of-a-kind wooden book. It translates the unique textures and designs of the original version into a much more accessible one. It refers to the original, while at the same time stands on its own to record, illustrate and communicate the unknown stories of the British molecatchers.
The Molecatcher’s Emblems assembles materials, myths and lores associated with the once prominent British profession, molecatching, and delve into the romanticised spectacle of capturing, ritualising and consuming of moles - ‘the creature of the dark’. Through a series of explorations in visualising the permeability and porousness between human and wildlife, the stories extend into the lores of British natural history and the long existing battles in natural resources.
The project began from archival research conducted in and around the site of the New River Head, which in turn led me to investigate the history of molecatchers on site and their mysterious involvement with the 17th century British rural landscape. The thread of research led me to modern day ‘pest-controllers’ who identify themselves as traditional molecatchers. They shared with me fascinating stories of their connections to the past, as well as their beliefs and ethics of practice. I’ve had the privilege to speak to, listen to and translate the mundane yet whimsical stories of lurking the rural landscape of modern Molecatcher Jeff Nicholls, who takes great pride in the wit and integrity of this traditional profession.
Jeff shared with me an abundance of stories from the 17th and 18th century only known to some Molecatchers in practice. The Molecatcher’s Emblems illustrates and records Jeff’s personal prayers and poems as a form of life recording. The myths and lores, materials and memories shared and translated are recorded in the tactile wooden book, illustrating the spectacular and ritualistic symbols of divinity and the dark arts, of witchcraft and folklore. The book collects a series of image making, structural building and symbol decoding, through re-interpretations and translations of the old lores and tales into materials and surfaces, bound with wood, horse hair, shaven willow strips and wires, as all used in the practice of this traditional craft.