Yingfei Zhu

BA Art and Design

As a viewer, have you ever thought about why some simple drawings will be counted as ‘art’ for an exhibition? What are these artworks about? How can you understand them? To this extent, interaction between the viewers and the artwork has always been the main focus of my project. Therefore, I intended to raise the interaction by setting viewers in a position that enables them to feel the atmosphere and evoke consideration about self-recognition.

The project consists of two parts: an action list and fire drawings based on the concept of making things by destroying things. The project is inspired by the firework art of the artist Guoqiang Cai. In order to create a similar effect, the fire was chosen as the medium of my drawings on these wood panels and paper. The fire series was demonstrated in a wood frame box for creating a sense of tension and desolate so that reflecting on the fragility of human lives and exploring the relationship between nature and human beings. It is also a way of attracting viewers’ attention to be more interactive with works.

Another series about action lists is an expression of self-recognition. Instructions normally happen in seconds but how will they look when they are extended into a process? Thus, paintings with various orders are drawn to show how an action can be visualized. For instance, the green painting is painted with ink under the idea of ‘splash’. Overall, it is considered to evoke thinking from viewers about how an action is applied in daily life and introduce that there are ambiguous boundaries for whether true or false for every decision we made. It is like a double-edged sword, which can be interpreted differently from different angles.