Leyi Yang

Lost in Translation
digital video, sound

My works captures my everyday thoughts. I express my ideas with a large variety of mediums, such as oil paintings, printmaking, video, digital sound, and animation. Working on the same idea with different mediums help me to form different conversations within them. However, I believe everything has its own color: note, line, shape and form, they all carry a certain emotion. I see my works as journals and poems.

The decay of a culture is an idea I have been constantly working on. I am trying out different materials such as transfer collages and digital video and sound collages to reveal the helpless feeling that I want to preserve my own culture but I don’t know how to; I want to know more about it but I don’t know where to find more information.

The process of collaging reinforms the idea of destruction and reconstruction. It is the process of me trying to know more about my own culture that has been not well preserved since the Chinese Cultural revolution. I don’t have much access to that traditional literature, Chinese opera, and art pieces anymore. They are decaying and disappearing from our daily lives. Incorporating fragments of language into my works, it transcends the meaning it originally has and exists as its pure form to express the struggle of coming from this culture but having not very much access to it. In this way, words as a part of my work are too vague to be meaningful but too complicated to be meaningless.

My art settles in its own reality as a mixture of my unconsciousness and consciousness that is still happening.