When did waiting become obsolete? When did the gap between wanting and having something – a song, a video, a moment of connection – shrink to the time it takes to tap a screen? Many of us remember a time when we weren’t always online, before the rise of our always-on culture. But what about those who grew up after the dawn of the Internet? The proliferation of dozens of apps, websites, and videos vying for attention has resulted in an ecosystem known as the attention economy.
This concept is at the heart of Yueyi Wang’s work, who goes by her artist sobriquet YY Wang. Her work is a monument to that technological change. It’s a reminder of the joy of the analogue world, rendered in a digital aesthetic.
Working across Scotland and China, Wang’s works tap into the nostalgic positivity of an aesthetic known as dreamcore – itself a product of the Internet age. Whether that be a short film that starts in a brightly coloured bedroom or a ceramic of Alice in Wonderland-esque toadstools, she’s inviting us into her world that’s both surreal and hyperreal.
The works also draw on Carl Jung’s psychological theories, which propose that dreams are a process of our subconscious, and what we see in them is an amalgamation of the life we’ve led. Jung understood that dreams don’t follow the rules of the real world, but incorporate our subconscious emotions. In our sleep, childhood nostalgia and adult anxieties combine, so we may dream we’re back at school, but we’ll be grown up and wearing the clothes we wore yesterday.
Wang’s works operate by the same dream logic. We see this, “Cool Pool”, a ceramic swimming pool that contains a rustic fountain, abstract plants, and a slide. They don’t make sense together, after all; when would you find a garden fountain inside a swimming pool? But it’s a construction of her childhood memories pieced together. These are all items she associates with play, even if they were experienced years apart.
It’s precisely how childhood memories work; we often remember something from our youth, but when we ask our parents, they reveal that it isn’t what happened, even though we recall it as if it were yesterday, and it feels so clear in our minds. Websites may have a change log of everything that has taken place, but our brains don’t work like that. The digital age may have shaped our minds, but the digital and the biological operate differently.
Her ceramic work featuring fungi is called “Feels like yesterday”, and it reflects how our memories work – sights and sounds can take us back years and even decades to a memory that hadn’t crossed our minds until now. What do these mushrooms say to us? Do they remind us of reading fairy tales or playing in a garden when we stumbled across some mushrooms?
The works were showcased in a three-person show at Saltspace in Glasgow, allowing visitors to imagine themselves as much smaller and what it would be like to exist in this surreal world of play.
Wang’s work may be based on her childhood, but she’s not asking us to live through her. Instead, she’s asking us what memories of our own do these works trigger. Do they make us nostalgic? Feel safe? Long for a time when we were less stressed and more at ease with life?
There are joyous and nostalgic elements in YY Wang’s work that make us feel safe, something we need in today’s world, where the news seems to be full of war and climate disasters. But there’s also something more profound. She’s asking us to look back on our childhoods and wonder whether there’s something we lost along the way. Did we lose our ability to dream big? To be courageous in our beliefs, even if everyone disagreed? Has the world become too scary, causing us to play it safe?
More information on YY Wang’s work may be found on her website and @avrile1111
All images copyright © YY Wang
