Yingqi Guan
About
Yingqi Guan is a jewellery and sculpture maker living in London. She has extensive experience in goldsmithing, enamel and ceramics. In 2019, she attended the Master Goldsmiths project in the studio of international artist Kim Buck. She is fascinated by traditional culture combined with contemporary art forms, her works have strong narrative background and rich visual tension.
She still insists on using pure handcraft to create works. In addition to mastering the craftsmanship, injecting consciousness, thoughts, attitude and concepts into art works is especially important for Guan Yingqi. Sometimes her work is also a product of social influence, making positive responses towards social issues and major incidences, while being critical and reflective. For Guan Yingqi, works are cultivative and positioning for artists. She studied jewellery design at the Central Academy of Fine Arts, and is about to graduate from the Royal College of Art with a MA degree. Her works are all based on eye (judge) / 爱 (Chinese character Love ài )/ I (exploration of self and identity) as a carrier of expression and use jewellery as a medium. As for the public viewing, Yingqi Guan has held a number of art exhibitions in China, Japan, London and Taiwan throughout the years. She is good at keeping scrutiny, critique, reflection and expression in her time with the perspective of narrative jewellery.
Degree Details
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Statement
‹ eye › Eyes capture my stories and my works, keep examining, reflecting, expressing and all love, and turn them into leakers between me and my works. When I look at them, they are also staring at me. When you are viewing my works, it’s like I am also staring at you. Through eye contact and capture, they become mirror images of each other and form a channel to connect stories and works, you and me.
‹ ài › love (Chinese character 爱ài) It is of strong emotions and close to the skin. All my enthusiasm and time are devoted to "creations". Out of love, I use creations to narrate the stories. My creations come from different loves, tangible or intangible, and all derive from the experience of life. They have their own spiritual inspirations, some from memory, some from an exposed thread, and some grow and sprout from dreams. They touch me, feel me, and receive my love.
‹ I › The relationship between me and my creations is just like that between me and the "other me". They form a relationship of mutual achievement. My creations spread my impulse and instinct without disguising, thus reaching the top of desire or passion. It is the embodiment full display, where the watermelon seeds I swallowed grow into forests, and I shuttle back and forth in different worlds to bring back the fragments which scratched me but stuck in the way between my childhood and adulthood.After immersion, more unknown doors will be opened.
"Eye, love (Chinese character 爱ài) and I, these three words share the same pronunciation. 'Eye' means gaze and the examination. I observe the world through the eyes，then make my reaction and express it through my works. The viewers also examine my works through the eyes to understand the stories and then respond. "Love" is an emotion and a powerful force, whether it is to give or receive love. I create through my own perspective and combine my own stories as my inspiration source. The viewers perceive those works from their own standpoint. The verb between eye/love/I and you is unlimited. It is a kind of motivation from the heart, which can be like, hate, miss and leave, so I finally left a space for the viewers to fill in their motivation. I want to convey my world view on love, family affection, life, indifference and violence. I am not interested in commercial models, but aim to explore the meaning on a deeper level. Therefore, reviewing the history of jewellery, I can always see all kinds of problems. I saw that the value of jewellery has changed and the boundaries of jewellery have become blurred. I hope to reflect on this issue with my works on the theme "emotion". Jewellery, in a sense, represents inner perception and will, because they are always in close contact with the body and skin, so they will carry some mysterious energy that looms from time to time. As we are always missing something, such as love and emotion. Therefore, they perform a healing function, will stick to our ego-state and bring about a complete self. "
Me and my ugliness
This work is an extension of the project [ I ] series based on my work [ eye / ài / I ]; 'I' is an individual, a physical body, a self and an id. I create through my own perspective and combine my own stories as my inspiration source. The viewers perceive those works from their own standpoint. It is fascinating that viewers gain different senses of substitution for the stories behind the works due to their different backgrounds.I have always given some care to objects that have a relationship with the body, especially "jewellery". This emotion of concern does not always depend on their strong symbolism and token sense, but rather my subconscious belief that during this time spent together in "jewellery", there is a bond, a relationship as if While I protect it from the outside world, it also empowers me.
I created a fictional world in the form of a film. The protagonist of this world is Marcya, which is Maria in a parallel time and space. Here, she splits and produces different consciousnesses due to external evaluations and voices. Only she can see and interact with these consciousnesses, she helplessly reached out to the people around her for help, but people ignored her. I express a miniature universe in the way of the subway. There are all kinds of people in it, and it is also the epitome of the patriarchal society in this miniature universe. They ignore the pain, cry for help from the women around them, and play with their mobile phones independently. They want to understand and try to understand by looking it up on their phone; however, they ignore real women around them.
Medium: Video
Me and my ugliness- Marcya
She is Maria in another parallel universe, where she is an ordinary woman. In this era, "appearance has become the most lucrative business in existence" and beauty is "the new commodity of today's hyper-consumption stage of capitalism". The increasing means of control and anxiety-provoking, as well as ways of suppressing dissent, show us the control and stereotypes of those in power, to obliterate and torment more possibilities for women whose worlds could have been fair play. Verbal violence and stereotypes have always been a way to build and consolidate power. However, under the onslaught of the new theocracy of power, the "SHE" who oppose murderous diversity and the politics of death must be very imaginative, knowing that the struggle will be long and hard, but that will not take away the fight in HER.
Medium: Gold plated 18k
Size: 53 x 9 x 7 cm x 2
Me and my ugliness
This series of work is the story of 16 women I interviewed. I draw strength from everyday examples of women's indomitable desire for equality and liberation. I try to use jewellery as a medium to illustrate the paradox of "ugly". It runs through, dominates, dictates the growth experience of some people, and even creates societal stereotypes. In this series of works, I altered what people have become accustomed to as the perception of "ugly", and explored it from a new perspective by changing roles. This isn't just a big heavy necklace. I draw strength from everyday examples of women's unbeatable desire for equality and liberation. Let it be a source of inspiration, to give people the courage to refuse to bow their heads, to give in, to break free, and pierce the veil of liberal ideology that hides hypocrisy, verbal violence, and destruction.
Medium: Silver
Size: 170 x 75 x 10 cm
Me and my ugliness - A woman's life
In this way, I hope to express the difference of different individuals, ugliness and beauty for women are a modern standard of beauty framed by gender, race, culpable consumerism and neoliberal context. These stereotyped commodity words seem critical and cold. This also appears to have worn away how women feel and think, ignoring how women have dealt with life and destiny in order to have a diverse life answer sheet.
In my work, I make different female body shapes in an abstract way, and behind each distinctive feature is a story. The annealed metal wire is full of toughness, and the twisted limbs are twisted and wired together by hand-knitting personally, showing a distinct visual tension, just like a woman's life and her strength are intertwined to narrate the fate story with women as the carrier. I translate this emotion into jewellery that resonates with the wearer.
Medium: Copper wire
Size: 180 x 80 x 9 cm