Working between photography, video, performance and installation, Chinese artist Yao Cong explores the profound and sometimes alienating relationship between people and nature.
Read MoreYao Cong was born in 1992 in Xi'an, China. In 2014, he received a BA in Intermedia Art from the China Academy of Art, and in 2017 received an MFA from the Royal College of Art in London.
Yao Cong's work has an environmental bent, hewing close to an adoration of the natural landscapes in which he places his figures. However, the works detail the problematics of a relationship with nature as we enter the anthropocene—a geologic era of hyper-industrial environmental mediation. Rather than using nature as a romantic scaffolding for human figures, Cong's work explores what of natural life remains when human civilisation has all but disrupted ecological rhythms.
In the single-channel video Under Blue (2015), Yao Cong riffs on the performative nature of gender by showing the textures of cosmetic products being applied to human skin at an extremely close angle. Yao Cong's camera-eye sifts canyon-like rivets and imperfections from the appliqué, perhaps even gesturing at the theatrical erotics of the 'blue movie' genre (another term for pornographic films) in the work's title. This way of rendering mineral textures on figures as landscapes—if only to reinstate a human/nature link—carries over into later works. The 2020 video Count, for example, shows a lone, carefully made-up bank teller counting non-existent notes in a desert-like, outdoor setting. Here, the indifference of the environment to human concerns such as beauty and currency points at the 'bankruptcy' of a culture far removed from nature.
The ten-screen video work The Square Reserve (2020—21) also shows figures in nature. Where Count highlighted alienation within its figure-landscape composition, The Square Reserve depicts figures in a space otherwise devoid of anthropomorphic affect. No city, no village—just human figures consuming beer and listening to music in a grotto. It is perhaps here where Cong most fluently, and also with such cunning simplicity, plots and negates the border between humanity and nature — a border which is as porous as it is constructed.
Yao Cong's solo shows include Flies Beyond the Clouds, Capsule Shanghai (2021).
Yao Cong's group shows include Golden Flow - Beijing Contemporary Art Expo, Beijing (2020); Zhijiang International Youth Art Festival, Hangzhou (2019); Holographia: 2018 International Art Festival, Times Art Museum, Beijing (2018); From/To: the Frontier of Chinese Art Education, San Francisco Art Institute (2018).
Sam Te Kani | Ocula | 2021
