Yan Liang

The Collection of Thoughts

Each short clip of animated collages, originally posted on my Instagram during 2019 – 2020. I decided to collectively put them together into a 10-minutes video for MPCAS 2021. The Collection of Thoughts plays as the emotional diary of my everyday life, communicating the theme about love, playfulness, COVID-19, criticism, sarcasm, isolation, coping mechanism, longing, and imagination. How the external world affects my internal thinking about life is fully expressed through this work. I am having the hopefulness about when the audiences are passing by my work, they could find some resonance or amused by the moment when they see the animated collages pop up to them randomly. And as we are all now experiencing the pandemic, whether this inevitable experience makes our life worse or better, I want to let my audiences know “you are not alone”, “I’ll make these for you to smile”, “this too shall pass”. Having the playful lens to see each situation and release each emotion are my purpose of this work and my view of life. Most of the animated collages have sound and music, hopefully, if the audiences walk closer to the building, they can hear the sound of the work. I also write the title of each collage on the bottom. By placing two collages and two titles on the same frame, conceptually that creates another layer of humor or implicit meaning that the audiences could possibly read from the texts + the moving images.

 

Bio

I was a surrealist oil painter before I realized the mass possibilities available in media art. By switching from paint and canvas to pixels and digital media, I expanded the ways that I could express myself as an artist. For me, this is the best representation of my contemporary art practice. I grew up with all sorts of pixelated moving images of cartoons, video games, and computer graphics. Digital media are part of my life, it plays very significant roles in my art. I often find images and videos online for manipulation and juxtaposition into digital collages that semblable surrealist paintings. I am a surrealist and conceptual artist who primarily practices digital and video art, photography, text, and sculpture. I typically use art as a way to express my subconscious mind, emotions, and personal experiences.