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Graphic Design

Yu Shang

Yu Shang was born in Shandong, China in 1995 and graduated from Beihang University, BA Graphic Design in 2018. Her work explores the relationship between human physicality and digital self-representation/projection and include videos, installations, photography and graphic design. As a communicator, she is never limited by the form of the work and is constantly trying new ways to interact. Her work Railway was shortlisted for the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, 2020.

Contact

https://www.shangyu.info

Degree Details

School of Communication

Graphic Design

This year, I have been exploring the modern uncanny that exists between the human body and self-representations in the digital world.

In the past, the earliest illusions existed in the mirror, and this another world in the mirror became the earliest digital fear. Today, it is cyberspace that replaces the world in the mirror as an important part of the construction of the entire world. Cyberspace is just like our living room, bedroom, community or city. We placed curiosity and emotion in it, and then it reshaped our language and ways of thinking. 

I am interested in Simulacra, as an independent reality, one that exists in daily culture within the digital form. In Deleuze's theory, this ‘movement of deterritorializaton’ pushes the simulacra to a point where they cease being artificial images to become indices of the new world. My practice looks digital space as another real word that exits in our daily life.

In today ’s world where virtuality and reality intersect, on the one hand, it is believed that the image is not a minor copy of the real world, but is real; on the other hand, facing the various digital representing of the human body, physicality is seen as the last defiance of the unreal. I believe that the simulacra society based on digital reality, especially the digitized human body, leads people to generate a modern uncanny.

Double

Double — Mirror as an abyss. You see your image in the fake “mirror”, a pixelated image with the appearance of an image loading - like you meet a bug due to the transmission speed.

Physicality

Hair brush — Handmade objects in drawers and on the dresser table

Encounter — An encounter of “physical I” and “digital I”.

“404 not found” locked drawer — Does the ideal virtual-self exits through a disappearance caused by system error in the end?

This work explores the environment of a dresser and its surrounding landscape to construct a space where the “real” world and the “digital” world interweave and imagine an encounter of “physical I” and “digital I”. The dresser is something that exists in the home, but I try to make it “unhomely”. According to Erndt Jentsch, uncanny is a disturbance of a clear state of inside and outside, it's a mix of "familiar" and "unfamiliar". the double (a concept in uncanny theory) is a way to analyze the relationship between the human physical body and the digital body and to deal with the feeling between ourselves and our reflections. The work consists of wallpaper, an interaction system, videos, some handmade objects, an album, a diorama.

Medium:

Mixed media

Size:

200cm x 140cm x 50cm

The Factory of Beauty-photo — The project is exploring the self, representation, alienation in the context of the digitally navigated everyday consumer reality and social media by representation of two worlds.

The Factory of Beauty-animation — The animation is about a doll’s factory, which metaphors people are making an ideal-self in the online world.
Today, our bodies are extensions of data networks, clicking, linking, and taking selfies, almost everyone is collaging an ideal virtual-self in the online world which comprises their videos, selfies, texts, and all the things they post on the social media. Our physical bodies and virtual-images are two realities in two worlds that exist simultaneously.

The Factory of Beauty is about a virtual dolls’ factory. Dolls are idealized, and they look similar, just like the uniform standard of beauty which is made by consumerism. The doll is a kind of commodity. The bodies that people display on the screen as spectacles are also like commodities, through which they gain satisfaction, confidence, and even money (live streaming). This is the real completion of Guy Debord’s The Society of Spectacle. Today, people showing themselves online is a process of making spectacles, which is also an industrial production process.

I chose to use collage for the animation because the final appearance of the animation on the screen is not entirely up to me, but is largely determined by the images I can find on the internet. What we look like on screen is not wholly shaped by ourselves, it depends a lot on machines and editing programs, such as cameras and filters, provided by applications that are not designed by the photographer.

Medium:

 Video installation

Size:

video:1’30’’; Installation: 150cm*120cm*50cm

1 0001

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A Train in Google Earth — This is a minimalist and abstract work that explores the human’s position in the “age of the word picture”.
Clement Valla talks of Google Earth as ‘a new model of representation: not through indexical photographs but through automated data collection from a myriad of different sources’ and of how these sources are ‘updated and endlessly combined to create a seamless illusion’.

In this work satellites image from Google Earth are put together side by side like a puzzle. You still can see the seams are not connected very well, but when it quickly moves over the window, these ‘bugs’ or seams cannot be found by the viewer. Google Earth does not look like earth but resembles other digital materials, however, because we spend so much of our lives looking at these materials it becomes real.

The model looks like an abstract train, which is a closed world between the infrastructure of technology (the tracks) and the superstructure of ideas (the carriage space). We as humans are now in the closed word created by the overlap between digital images and networks. The train is a circular shape that represents how people are in a huge and imperceptible nihilistic vortex.

Medium:

3D model

Size:

31’’

Site-1 — Screen as a site of the register of representations through which we can manipulate and moderate the gaze.

Site-2

Site-demo — When viewers slide the screen, they see only very limited images. Viewers in front of the screen are always in a passive position.
In 1987, Wolfgang Schivelbusch said first moving images were images from the windows of trains. The screen and train are two sites that have many connections. The train is a closed world that must follow set tracks. Showing that what we are not free to look but set on a particular path. Just like the video or images we look at on screen, the camera chooses what to show us rather than our own eyes. Viewers in front of the screen are always in a passive position

Medium:

Mixed media, plaster, steel tube, screen

Size:

30cm*15cm

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