Yitong Zhang

Yitong Zhang is an object maker. Before studying for an MA at the Royal College of Art, in 2020 she graduated from the Glasgow School of Art with a first-class honours Bachelor’s degree, also travelling for an academic exchange to the California College of the Arts. Yitong has won the New Designers: Goldsmiths’ Company Silversmithing Award, Goldsmiths’ Craft & Design Council Award, and the Behrens Foundation Bursary Award, has been nominated for the Outstanding Student of the Year Award, and others, and participated in multiple international exhibitions such as London Craft Week, Beijing Design Week, the Beijing International Jewellery Art Exhibition, the China International Contemporary Metal Art Exhibition, and the Itami International Jewellery Exhibition in Japan. In September 2021, Yitong also held a transdisciplinary exhibition, ‘Jewellery is a Poem’, in Beijing, in which she collaborated with six well-known Chinese poets.

Yitong’s current practice focuses on the exploration and discussion of the properties and state of craft within a digital object-making context through an intertextual method of creation between poetry and objects. In the future, Yitong aims to experiment with the strategy of ‘Craft + X’, seeking more possibilities in the interactions between craft and industry.

The Creation

Xidu Heshang

In his craftsman’s house,

He strikes an ouroboros:

clang-clink-clang-clang.

The outcasts cry out loud

on the barren earth,

bursting into tears before the wall.

They open up a can

that hurts their fingers,

looking for the shadow of a snake.

Or all this goes the other way round.

Men and women

strike scales and runes

with unending claps.

God creates a shadow.

06/2021

(Tr. Liang Yujing)

Yitong’s practice further develops her collaborative exhibition with six poets, held in September 2021. This collaboration started from Yitong’s videos of the making process of two rings (a handmade silver ring and a 3D-printed PLA ring), which were sent to the invited poets later as a stereoscopic inspiration. Then Yitong recreated works based on the eight poems she received from the six poets. The whole process of the project, from idea, experimental exhibition, and feedback to recreation, forms the basis and primary research of Yitong’s current practice.

During the second year of her MA, by continuously reviewing and reflecting on the poems, Yitong tried to develop her project in two parallel directions: first, from the perspective of the content of poems, embodying the encounter and debate between the two object-making mediums, traditional craft and digital technology, and second, from the perspective of the form, which is how poetry as literary art and object as visual art influence each other. Through an intertextual method of creation between poetry and object, Yitong aims to explore the interaction between two incompletely homogeneous mediums.

Digitalogy No.1 – Medium: Silver-plated brass, copper, bronze

Digitalogy No.2 – Medium: Silver-plated copper, bronze

Digitalogy No.3 – Medium: Silver-plated brass

The poems have stimulated Yitong’s thinking about the next generation of objects, created by traditional craft and digital technology, human hand and machine.

In providing a potential response to this question, this collection of work, Digitalogy, is inspired by the forms of the broken models caused by the wrong order that is accidentally used while building models with 3D software, which could not actually be printed. With more experiments, Yitong found that these dramatic and unpredictable incorrect forms which have been rejected, and which the digital system tries to exclude, could become an aesthetic principle, and be made up and realised through craft. This series of works is based on four objects located on different visual planes on the dining table. The attached forms generated by digital mistakes are made through forging and chasing. Yitong aims to offer a point of view in thinking about the potential development of traditional craft in the digital environment, as well as the context for a discussion about the dialogue between the logic of digital technology and human.

12/03/2022 – Medium: Silver-plated brass

26/03/2022 – Medium: Silver-plated brass

12/04/2022 – Medium: Silver

This collection of works is titled by the dates they were made and focuses on exploring the relationship between object, material, and poetry. Yitong attempts to create objects that refuse words, with the poetry completely belonging to themselves in the way of the paradox between de-symbolisation and the retaining of functionality. Through contrasting, exchanging, and combining the language characteristics of poetry and objects, Yitong is interested in investigating the poetic and abstract narrative of metal objects through these works.

Abstract Functional Functionality Language Material Narratives Materiality Metal Metalwork Object Poetic poetry Symbolism

Yitong Zhang

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Royal College of Art