Toronto-based artist, mia yang, graduated from OCAD University in 2021. specialize in drawing, painting, and printmaking. mia was born in the North of China in 1999, growing up experiences the adaptation to a new environment, facing the cultural differences that have greatly influenced her work in art.
Mia explores issues of environmental pollution, gender equality, race, discrimination, human rights and cultural differences. Mia merges cultures smoothly in her artwork through her view and experience, experimenting across disciplines within different mediums. In her work, she focuses on aesthetics and uses the power of colour to deliver the message. The rich historical element is peaking through with her uses of symbolic icons. Explore identity through rich historical culture and traditions, discovering the contemporary world through an immigrant's lens.
Artist statement:
Reminiscence
Looking at old images brings back memories of the past; it has the ability to teleport us back to a particular day, period, and location where we can feel every detail. Time passes and left the image with wear and tear, the figures fade away, leaving an empty backdrop in our memories.
In my work, I use the relationship between memories and images to share personal diasporic experiences. I embed memories of past family members, significant places and life-changing events onto paper to mark the milestones in life. These remarkable moments indicate changes, happiness, growth, traditions, and embracement. The intention is to give the memories a new life and allow the impression to live on. There are twenty-one regular photo-sized hand-made papers in this series. As a way to reconfigure, edit, and rejuvenate the past, digitally printed family photographs are dissembled and restored through the artistic process of addition and subtraction; Include the element of momentary senses and minus the data that were obliterated. Old family photographs were ripped into pieces and fragments of coloured paper pulps in a blender, along with rice paper. The 4” x 6” mould and deckle turn the paper pulp into sheets of paper. Abstracted portraits appear through the presence of light in relation to the thickness of the pulp paste. The simplified presentation of portraits echoing the ghostly nature of photography narratives in relation to the decayed memories; residue of time manifests through the yellowing of the images.
Paper pulp modelling paste was used to sculpt three-dimensional portraits on the surface of the paper. Images emerge on top of the paper by a LED light projection from the back of the box frame. Using the magnification device, circular micro-series record the fine detail of the materiality, symbolizing the invisibility and limitation of seeing with the naked eye, no less than a reminiscent’s eagerness to retrieve.
