Yuchen Wang

Yuchen Wang is a multidisciplinary designer, born in Hanover, Germany, and raised in Beijing. Coming from an architecture background, including a Master’s degree from the Bartlett School of Architecture at UCL, Yuchen has always been fascinated by sensory perceptions of space and scale.

Combining her experiences in jewellery design and architecture, silversmithing and digital modelling, Yuchen’s work reflects her exploration of the intimacy between the human body and the environment, questioning the kinaesthetic and emotional connection that space builds with the people it hosts.

Yuchen has worked as a jewellery designer and independent interior designer. She has collaborated with fashion brands for accessory collections. She has also launched an interior design project in mainland China.

‘I am the space, where I am.’ – Noël Arnaud

Yuchen’s practice looks at the human body and its interrelationship with the environment. While we are in constant interaction with the environment, detaching the image of the Self from its spatial existence tends to be difficult.

This prompted her to think: ‘is there a way to amplify the marks of the encounter?’. With the notion of ‘the body is the margin of all my perceptions’, her work focuses attention on the forces around the body, in which we experience the world intimately and intertwine with each other’s Self subjectively.

Through the use of digital techniques, AI and traditional handcrafts, Yuchen creates hybrid jewellery pieces that sit between the combination of natural and artificial, chaotic and organised, random and logical. Her further development of practical ornaments questions our position within the environment around us.

‘Exaggerate forces around the body, and make jewellery speak invisibly’, Yuchen states.

Optical Structure: Archer's Ring, Sterling Silver

Focusing her attention on practical objects, Yuchen generates a type of jewellery to meet both its aesthetic and functional requirements through the logic of topological optimisation. Based on the classic form of the Chinese archer’s ring, computational simulation results in forms with less material and a more efficient performance. The distribution of material reminds us how it is worn and how it works.

Medium:

Sterling Silver

A signet ring is used like a signature. It has an engraved symbol or letters on the top of the ring as a representation of the wearer to express their individuality or status.

Considering various gestures and forces a person may use during stamping, Yuchen designed a series of new signet rings based on the idea of topological optimisation, a computational method that optimises the distribution of material within a defined domain, for a given set of loads, boundary conditions and constraints, with the goal of maximising system performance. With no pattern or other visual language as the starting point, the new rings express the uniqueness of the wearer through the whole structure of their body, making a bridging connection between the perception of Self, the fingers and the place where the rings stamp.

Medium:

Sterling Silver

Artificial Intelligence contemporary jewellery functional jewellery Identity And Body individuality signature silver Wearable

To exaggerate forces around our body, and simultaneously amplify our impact on the environment, everyday items of jewellery, including rings, bracelets, earrings and necklaces, are simulated digitally through the parameters of loads and supports to be submitted to the process of wear and tear. Relying on computational technologies, Yuchen’s work has also created a dialogue between the old and the new: this lies partly in the process by which the form is generated, and partly in the way it is made physically.

Medium:

Sterling Silver

Artificial Intelligence body contemporary jewellery corrosion silver time touch wear and tear

Yuchen Wang

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Royal College of Art