Wang Yitong was born in Beijing, China in 1997. Her creations focuses on transforming abstract objects into tangible works that can be seen and heard. She tries to use images as a bridge to convey vague and conceptual feelings and emotions.
Yitong Wang 王艺潼
My work in the degree show is called Pipi and Gogo. The work is based on the relationship between humans and companion animals. Pipi and Gogo are the names of my cats, and they are the creators of this work too. In this work, we hope to discuss the emotional connection, communication and cooperation between different species beyond language and even beyond biological structure. I also want to reflect the current situation of my region, and to bring this important thing to people's vision through perceptual communication.
I wanted to do this at first because I saw a lot of very sad events about pets happening in my country during the pandemic. For example, something happened like the owner was taken to the hospital because of the virus, and community workers went into their home and killed all their cats. But it was legal for staff to enter an infected person's home to disinfect, and they thought it was "reasonable" to kill the cat because it could also be infected. But other than that, I've seen many, many comments about these things, many people think it's the right thing to do, they think pets should be killed as long as there is even a slight risk of putting other humans at risk.
Of course not all the communities and people are doing this, there are a large number of communities that do their best to keep pets safe and healthy, but these incidents made me realize that many people in my country think of pets as stuff that can be discarded. For me and many other pet owners, they are no different from our family. It's a very, very big difference in emotional cognition.Therefore, I made this work, hoping to raise the subject for discussion and convey feelings. I hope that through my work, other people can also feel the emotions and something that I focus on.
I think just discussing the rational is not enough, like it's hard for me to tell people why my cat is so important to me, sensibility is a very important part of human beings, so I hope to communicate with others through sensibility.
Overall it was a very happy and sad creative process, and I refocused on our relationship. To feel the pure emotional connection between us again, and remember somethings like their vulnerability in the environment I live in, my responsibilities, and our dependence on each other.
In these images, I try to capture emotions and feelings and reduce the appearance of concrete things. I want to explore more perceptual things through images, so the images are closer to abstraction.
I tried to capture some of their traces, parts, some intimate perspectives, such as cat ears, cat tails, shadows.and use my feelings to do some processing in computer.
In this images , I guide my cat to play on paper that leaves a temperature trace, and then I record the vision on the paper and do a little post-processing. The other images are more from my perspective, while these I think are Pipi and Gogo's own works.
It's their thoughts, their emotions, their paintings.
This is one of my previous work.
When I was really, really young, my parents took me to the place where these pictures were taken. At that time, my mother told me that there lived a black dragon and the black dragon ruled the village. This is my first memory of God, and the location has become a unique symbol in my heart, a sense of alienation, and fear and awe of the unknown.
In my life now, the existence of God is more like a legend and story to me, only a vague concept, but I can still feel an indescribable gaze. I always subconsciously think that something is with me all the time. My destiny is not entirely in my control. Something is protecting me, but it is also monitoring me.
When I returned to the village as an adult, I took these pictures. I wanted to express a kind of pure reverence, but that reverence was unembodied with alienation and inexprestibility. In the image, I did not show the elements related to gods and religions, because I felt that in my memory, they were also invisible, non-concrete and abstract, and existed only as a feeling.