After graduating as a gemmologist, Yichen Guo studied at the Royal College of Art to become a jewellery artist. She loves to use poetic language to build a connection between the material and immaterial worlds.
Yichen Guo
A chronic sense of ambivalence sways my consciousness: it derives from the influence and trauma of those parts of the self that overflow into reality in the process of constant correction of the objective world to the subjective world.
The two series of works echo the struggle and inquiry of my ambivalence inside out. Though using similar elements, their materiality changes subtly through different ways of combining them.
‘Now, just so long as the object is liberated only in its function, man equally is liberated only as user of that object.’
— The System of Objects (1996), Jean Baudrillard
The increase in productivity and the deepening development of capitalism has allowed commodities to take over the material world: the market has established a symbolic system through the construction of an order of things, and people are simply functionalised in accordance with the requirements of the system. Our relationship with objects has become simplified – they can become our masters. The work is a rephrasing based on Zhuangzi's ‘Dream Butterfly’ theory.
Medium:
Silver, Stainless steel, Butterfly wingsSize:
220 × 15× 10mm
The poet Jaromil, in Milan Kundera’s Life is Elsewhere, constructs a dreamy world of fantasy, full of lyricism and praise. In fleeing from the shackles of reality, he continually entered this endless fantasy to lick his wounds, imagining himself as the sublime and unyielding Xavier.
Slightly different from Jaromil, the real and virtual selves are not entirely separated in the process of my self-discovery, they are intertwined. The more dreamlike and perfect the construction of the dream is, the more difficult it is to recognise the self projected into reality, whilst in turn the dream becomes transitory and illusory. We are unable to escape to either end of the world for security.
The juxtaposition of the butterfly and the blade in the work is not static, the overlapping of the vibrating wings with the spinning blade gives the work a kinetic energy: the relationship between the two develops from opposition and balance through this dynamic combination, a metaphor for a liminal zone where reality and illusion converge,the energy that was once in the realm of fantasy gradually travels to the world of reality, where the true self grows.
Medium:
Silver, Butterfly wings
‘He dreamed, fell asleep while dreaming, and dreamed another dream, so that his sleep was like a box into which another box is fitted, and in that one still another box, and in this one another still, and so on.’
— Life is Elsewhere (1973) Milan Kundera