This artistic practice stems from a reflection on the fragility of life, the experience of absence, and the different forms of persistence that remain after disappearance. I conceive of absence as an active vital force, a medium linking memory, existence, and disappearance. The portraits present in the work refer to the disappearance of individuals while simultaneously echoing the traces left by violence within the social sphere, as well as those lived experiences that have been forgotten, silenced, or erased from collective memory.
To translate these erased lives into material form, my artistic gesture appropriates a certain form of material violence. Using a carving knife, I violently scratch transparent plastic in order to sculpt what they look like in my memory, while evoking what remains of life. From a theological perspective, death represents a turning point in existence; it is after the death of the physical body that the life of the soul truly manifests itself. In my practice, I sculpt portraits on transparent plastic with a knife in such a way that certain details can only be perceived through a specific angle of light, thereby generating emotion from emptiness. I violently twist the transparent material and use light to create the shadow of the portrait, as though the soul remained connected to life through the fragile silhouette of the figure. The shadow is alternately twisted, superimposed, gathered, and dispersed, creating an unpredictable and unreal space. A poetic visual experience of life emerges, within which a dialogue with the soul can take place.
In this installation, I introduced a mechanical movement element to animate the portrait. The sounds produced by the machines also form an integral part of the work: heavy and rhythmic noises that evoke the experience of listening to industrial music. These sounds generate the atmosphere of an empty and dark factory floor, marked by its dogmatic order and by the cold, rigid, and oppressive texture of mechanical tools. The themes explored by industrial music often revolve around alienation, indifference, pain, repression, and control. One of its most emblematic groups is Throbbing Gristle. Their practice was grounded in conceptual experimentation and in a desire to explore the disturbing capacities of sound, creating works that are meant to be experienced live rather than merely listened to. This approach strongly resonates with the ideas I seek to convey. Through this oppressive industrial atmosphere, I attempt to confront trauma directly. At the same time, the portrait shifts from clarity to blur according to the rhythm of the machine, establishing a continuous oscillation between absence and presence. This repetitive movement also recalls artificial respiration or an artificial heart, like a form of permanent life support in which the machine appears to become the body of the portrait itself. As a means of intervention, I sought to awaken these souls through the machine and to grant the portraits a form of rebirth, perhaps even a kind of immortality.
The use of these materials within portraiture constitutes an amalgamation of my personal emotions and experiences, transformed in order to render my feelings more intuitive and immediate. As Deleuze and Guattari write: “The aim of art, with the means of the material, is to wrest the percept from perceptions of objects and the states of a perceiving subject, to wrest the affect from affections as the transition from one state to another: to extract a bloc of sensations, a pure being of sensation.” In their formulation, art transforms perceptions into percepts and affections into affects. Emotions and perceptions originate in subjective experience, yet the sensations that emerge from them can acquire a form of autonomy. Feelings and perceptual objects are apprehended through the senses, while at the same time existing independently of the subject, much like ideas. Is it therefore possible to understand that, within my practice, the presence of the soul in the portrait is neither real nor virtual, but rather possible? On the surface, the work consists of portraits and materials; in essence, however, it constitutes a spiritual and psychological inquiry, a process through which I seek unity between the soul and myself. Each experience inscribes itself within the continuum of my life and becomes synchronically linked to the totality of my existence. In this sense, the work represents both a return to life and a transcendence of life.
Death is no longer understood as an end, but as another mode of being. As Heidegger argues, death as a limit continually permeates the present because the present remains in constant relation to it. Heidegger describes this fundamental relation as Being-toward-death. Death is a possibility that cannot be surpassed because it constitutes the ultimate possibility of existence itself. My practice is therefore an exploration of death that leads toward a celebration of life and existence—an intervention into life through death. It is a process of organizing memory and dialogue through the repeated drawing and revision of portraits. Through transparent plastic and light, perceptions and emotions are decomposed and reorganized into an ephemeral monument of sensations and affects. This monument transforms my personal and sensory experiences into a composite structure. As Deleuze and Guattari write: “Art is the language of sensations, whether it passes through words, colors, sounds, or stones. Art has no opinion. Art undoes the triple organization of perceptions, affections, and opinions, replacing it with a monument composed of percepts, affects, and blocs of sensations that stand in place of language.” This monument, composed of sensations and emotions, does not seek to commemorate what has happened. Rather, it enables a form of communication between the present and the future. Through this communication, I seek a possible symbiosis with multiple souls. Death is the seal of existence and perhaps the beginning of rebirth.
Bibliographie：
https://www.metalorgie.com/groupe/Throbbing-Gristle
DELEUZE Gilles, GUATTARI Félix. Qu’est-ce que la philosophie ? Les éditions de Minuit. Collection : Critique, 1991, p.158. 166
Wolfgang Stegmüller, La philosophie contemporaine dominante, Traduit par Wang Bingwen，Pékin : The Commercial Presse, 1986, p. 202.
YUTONG YIN 