Today we’d like to introduce you to Wei Han Yang.
Hi Wei Han, thanks for joining us today. We’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
I just completed my MFA in photography and media at California Institute of the Arts. I got my undergraduate major in journalism. It took me two years to realize that I do not want to write reports that only exist for a day or two, and I am not that type of person who can interview or photograph strangers easily. In my junior year, I started to audit at the photography department in the art school. I had a good teacher, with him I got to know the photography’s role in art and its conceptual discourse. A year after graduation, I went to CalArts. I studied with Sharon Lockhart, James Benning and many other great artists. During the two years, I explored my art language and got more chances to expose my work to the public.
Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
Well, there should be some difficulties, yet most (if not all) of them have positive sides, depending on how you look at them. When I was still an audit student, I could not access the facilities such as darkroom and inkjet printer or find a place to learn those skills, but this allowed me to spend more time in the library and encouraged me to learn as much as I can when I entered the graduate school.
I feel I can not take photographs of someone who I am not familiar with, nor in a place where I have not had much feeling with; thus it took me quite a while to adapt to the natural and social environment of Los Angeles. In the first year of my graduate study, I had failures in some practices, but I did not rush myself to make new, complete pieces. Later when I got more used to this place, I made some works that I could not make anywhere else, like The Retracing, a piece that has a strong bonding with the people and the landscape here.
Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your work?
I love how life presents itself more than how it is represented, and I think photography is the best medium to show life’s presentation. My practice explores the relationship between memory and its subordinate imagery. Rooted in everyday experience, I experiment across a spectrum of photographic formats and subjects, fighting with the ephemerality of the mundane and the precarious nature of the remembrance.
I am always driven by photography’s capability to suspend everyday moments yet open up narrations. In Untitled (Basketball Shooting), a couple (or not?) fails to relate to each other when the woman is walking naturally while the man is abruptly doing a basketball shooting action. In Identifying the Plant, a woman is crouching down to identify a plant. Yet her delicate outfit and the unremarkable surroundings; the eye-catching violet cress and the inconspicuous weed being identified, together unfold layers of contradiction. Untitled (Seated Man) depicts a man who, on a whim, is about to be take off his clothes in nature but suddenly feels reluctant to even put his feet onto the ground as he thinks it is dirty.
Several pieces are a group of photographs. For example, Tian Mi Mi is an endeavor to recreate a music video film still I first saw in my childhood. I shot a 26-minute video and later watched it frame by frame, intending to pick out a single image that is identical to the one in my mind. However, I gradually realized what I wanted was unachievable, as memory is not a specific image that we can claim every detail of. The final result is ten similar yet slightly different photographs that I feel somehow “correct”. The ten visible, tangible photographs together form an intangible, haunted thing, the memory. We are looking at something that cannot be looked at.
Do you have any advice for those just starting out?
I think different things work for different people. From my own perspective, I would say be devoted and patient to your work; take time to explore who you are and what you are truly interested in.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.yangweihan.com
- Instagram: @yang__weihan
