Haiyu Yuan

My work focuses on the ‘reinvestment’ of contemporary subculture. Most of my works are underpinned by an interrogation of the relationship between younger generations and the contemporary social context. How is the world understood through various emergent youth cultures? How we look at images? There are many questions I would like to discuss through my works.

To understand the dimensions of subculture, I examine its ‘becoming’ process, exploring the ways the copy is output through information dissemination – looking in particular at symbols that cannot be summarized. Even garbage by-products (spam) should be understood within the category of ‘subculture', to be examined as another virtual reality. Most of my paintings borrow elements from these fragments of emergent subculture and try to combine or reconstruct them into an interesting ‘reinvestment’. Such ‘reinvestment’ may about editing new narratives and decoding traditional symbols and images.