Yanyi Hu

About

Yanyi Hu (YY), born in China (2000), currently based in London, is a multidisciplinary artist mainly working with printmaking and painting. She blends analog and digital techniques to explore diverse topics, including restoration, information loss, and how memory, data, and knowledge are preserved and altered, while delving into the subconscious and its expression through imagery.

Her work operates through subliminal processes, akin to the unseen organs within our bodies that drive actions, revealing hidden layers of meaning. Her practice resembles a piece of Blu-Tack, embodying the same essence (viscosity) each time but manifesting in varied forms (shape). Through such attempts, she explores the significance of the world to us and how we perceive reality, and invites the audience to enter a realm of assemblage, experiencing impermanence and other evolving themes.

The blue sky is real; the sunlight’s sharp, moonlight’s dim is real; the morning dew that drips, the frost on the windowsill, the dense, lush branches and leaves are real; the sound of waves crashing on the sand is real; the wind like a razor’s edge is real; the changing seasons are real; the heavy raindrops, the mist before dawn are real; mirages are real. Reality is a fluid plane, where information reflects off its surface, first through our senses and then reaches the mind. Thus, with each breath we take, we feel the blood flow through our bodies, we understand the meaning of tears, and responding with the same flame to a lover’s gaze, we shape ourselves with all that we believe in and have been forsaken by, using this heart.

Yet we can never truly reach the essence of things; all attempts to get closer are merely clumsy imitations of nature. When depicting a tree, we capture not only the visual, but rather the part of its existence that is reflected in our mind. Therefore, no matter how high the resolution of a camera or monitor, even if it perfectly captures every detail of the tree at a specific moment, down to every vein of the leaf, it still cannot fully convey the tree’s true existence. But if we view the entire world as a vast holographic projection box, gently placing the unreachable loss at our feet, and feeling the continuity of sunlight, the tiny heartbeat of a gecko, the breath of a horse, by then, we will come to realize the weight of the heart, a weight that exists in a different plane from reality.