FEI YINING

Education

Born in Harbin, Fei Yining graduated from the School of Journalism at Fudan University, Shanghai, in 2013. In 2017, she received her MFA in Design and Technology from the Parsons School of Design, The New School. Upon graduation, Fei relocated to Shanghai, where she currently lives and works.

Fei Yining Artworks

Fable

Set within a post-apocalyptic universe, Fei Yining’s futurist animations and videos are contemptuous of anthropocentrism, proposing alternative states of existence for mankind, artificial intelligence and nature. Her narratives are informed by mythology, ecological theory and magical realist literature, including The Bloody Chamber (1979) and Nights at the Circus (1984) by Angela Carter. Often recounted by a soft, soothing voiceover that evokes therapy instructions, her tale-telling navigates the audience through multiple dimensions of time and space.

Fei’s 2019 animation Breakfast Ritual: Art Must Be Artificial depicts a domestic scene in an age when human civilisation has regressed. An A.I., which has the avatar of a young girl, performs the ritual of repeating hypnotic sentences and running fingers over a cut-up fig, while arrogantly asserting that ‘everything is gone, but everything will be better.’

Mutualism

Fei Yining develops a fluid system of harmony in her practice that celebrates the metamorphosis and hybridity of organisms. Generated by computer graphics and algorithms, the dazzling, colourful imagery in her video work imagines the possibilities of how human beings can benefit from our association with mycorrhizal networks and the Wood Wide Web – the way in which organisms like plants, trees and fungi are joined to one another by vast networks. Stories of Bifurcation I: Grandma (2021) sets its narrative on the prototype of Monotropa uniflora (ghost plant), which relies not on sunlight but fungi to grow. The story unfolds as the narrator traces her family tree and discovers how her humanoid ‘grandma’ simulates the reproduction mode of the plant and develops a female pedigree via asexual reproduction.

The cyborg

Fei Yining uses a diverse range of mediums such as resin, papier-mâché, metal and wire to create grotesque human-plant-furniture hybrids. Rendered through computer modelling, 3D printing, hand finishing and colouring, the works result in a smooth colour transition on the surface that suggests a process of dynamic generation. In her ‘Sad Face’ series (2019), a lightbulb is installed inside a crying anime eye. The dripping tears pile up from the bottom, forming something that resembles plant stems or the two legs of a cyborg. In the ‘Mirror’ series (2020), a mirror is framed by a turgid, fleshy, organ-like structure embellished with feathers and glass pendants.

Exhibitions

In 2022, Fei Yining presented her first solo exhibition Fei Yining: Little Songs of Futility at Hive Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing.

Selected group exhibitions include: Science Fiction and Hallucination, MAXXI Museum, Rome (2022); The Circulation of Images: A Study on Medium Identity, Voyage UCCA Lab, Shanghai (2021); Fortune Exhibition of Li’s Family House, White Space Beijing, Beijing (2021); Immaterial / Re-material: A Brief History of Computing Art, UCCA Beijing, Beijing (2020); From New York to Brussels; Los Angeles to Shanghai, SPURS Gallery, Beijing (2020); Resistance of the Sleepers, UCCA Dune, Qinhuangdao (2020); Advent: Inventing Landscape, Produce the Earth, Qianshao Contemporary Art Center, Shanghai (2019); Steadfastly Raise the Standards in Nonproductive Construction, Don Gallery, Shanghai (2018).

Website and Instagram

Fei Yining’s website can be found here, and her Instagram can be found here.

Shanyu Zhong | Ocula | 2023