- Xiangfei Yan (Fay) is an artist and jeweller from China. She is interested not only in the material and crafts of jewellery but also in the contemporary nature of jewellery. With a strong perception of society and history, her works often emerge from social and historical structural human oppression and show the continuance of banalisation and the normalisation of exploitation.
Xiangfei Yan(Fay)
So many people fantasise about their future wedding – me too.
‘What will your wedding be like? Will there be petals, bouquets, cakes and champagne towers?’ As a jewellery designer, I design and make a lot of wedding jewellery, what do these beautiful jewelry and ceremonies represent. Maybe we are immersed in the wonderful rain of petals and diamonds but never think about what a beautiful wedding ceremony brings.
Marriage is viewed as a human universal, and by the same token, the rituals and ceremonies marking a marriage are just as universal. In many cultures, the traditional heterosexual wedding ceremony contains not only rituals of reproduction and fertility that are important to both sexes but also displays of wealth and resources on the part of the groom, which is of particular evolutionary interest to women. There are also symbols of chastity on the part of the bride, which is of particular evolutionary interest to men. Essentially, the wedding is not only a pair-bonding codification but also a display of male and female reproductive goals and strategies. The purpose of modern marriage ceremonies has long gone beyond the simple reproductive goals of men and women.
Within the relations of contemporary capitalist production, it is a compulsory obligation to cooperate with heterosexual relations for fertility and to be able-bodied for production, and these rules operate in society. They interweave with and influence each other, and jointly build an ideal body that can meet the utilitarian needs of society and can not only give birth naturally but also engage in physical production: such a body has also become the basic attribute of ‘high-quality’ citizens – what a government desires. The children who own the future regard the female body as the ideological field of the state and the nation, which further materialises the female body and reproductive function. The wedding ceremony is the chain that links the reproductive requirements of women and the social requirement for families.
The concept of marriage as a reproductive contract, or the wedding as a reproductive ritual, is almost explicitly stated in several wedding customs. The champagne tower occupies a very important position in an idealised image of the wedding ceremony. The tower shape symbolises the consolidation of sweet love, and it is also the eternal commemoration of a happy marriage. The clear glass with golden sparkling wine and lights, like LSD, lets us drown in sweetness.
To reveal the structure of this ritual, I focused on its architecture. The formation and consolidation of a patriarchal wedding ceremony is like the completion of a building. It has been continuously promoted in thousands of years of history, and the wedding ceremony has undoubtedly played a very important role. The most important part of a wedding only exists for a day, or even a few hours, just as scaffolding exists in relation to a building. Scaffolding is temporary and can be dismantled and reused. When the building is complete, it is dismantled and transported to another location.
In this series, I used two kinds of scaffolds: the first one is a metal scaffold made of aluminum tubing, to express the internal logic of the champagne tower. The other is to build the cake with scaffolding, made of very traditional Chinese bamboo and hemp rope. This type of scaffolding is still very common in southern China. This format is used to expose the historical and cultural structures beneath the veneer of beautiful rituals.
Medium:
Aluminum, Resin, Champagne glassSize:
70x70x90cm
The wedding cake has become a standard item in weddings worldwide, and itself is a symbol of fertility. Even in eastern societies such as Japan, a husband and wife holding a knife to cut a cake represent a symbol of sex, and people view marriage as a society for sexual intercourse recognition. In contrast, the size of the wedding cake represents family wealth and social status.
This work used the most traditional bamboo scaffolding crafts to express the profound influence of Western wedding culture in Asian society, and the compositional structure of the interior of the wedding ceremony.
Medium:
Bamboo, Hemp ropeSize:
50x50x70cm
Flowers and lotus seeds are symbols of natural fertility. In China, we often sprinkle red dates, peanuts, lotus seeds and other beans on new couples’ wedding beds to signify the desire for the birth of a precious child. This not only puts invisible pressure on female fertility but is also a reminder of the cultural preference for boys. I sprinkled these grains on the bed, and my boyfriend and I lay on it, the pain of being squeezed by the grains suggesting that we want to preserve our family and society by giving birth to a boy.
In Collaboration with:
Mei is a Chinese photographer who has a unique perspective on shooting.
Medium:
PhotographySize:
16x20inch,12x16inch
I changed the movement of sowing: the posture of throwing into the air makes people feel relaxed, and combined with the weightless beans and petals, these factors work together to complete this movement. I changed the motion, installed needles under each bean, and the process of piercing the satin and cotton was mind-blowing, because it represented destruction. And does the blessing of many children and many blessings also contain harm?