Jessie Yingying Gong (born in 1990 in China) is a Chinese visual artist and photographer, whose works often speak of personal and collective memory, cultural identity, symbols and language.
In her series Mother, she offers a refreshing take on vernacular photography and portraiture. Reflecting upon her own family archive, Jessie recreated a unique visual diary in which we embarked on a journey through her mother’s past. She explains: “Mother is a publication of the image journal of my mother before I was born. I try to find the threads and strands to knit her past together with the photos of her youth. It’s a fiction full of lived experiences. I am not there, yet I am also there.”
Photographs were taken between 1980 and 1989, when Jessie’s mother was 18-27 years old. Old images are associated with contemporary texts written in 2015, in which Jessie asked her mother to retrospectively recollect her memories.
Having been born and raised in China before setting out to study and live in Europe; prompted in Jessie a lasting fascination with the topics of memory, identity, symbols and language. She is currently developing a series of works regarding the form, materialization and development of language. The research into these aspects of language, with a focus on the written forms, leads her to a kind of archaeology of symbolism, that serves to chronicle our history on a multitude of levels.
Jessie studied in London College of Communication and Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam. She has completed several artist residencies, and been awarded Young Talent and Artist Project contributions from Mondriaan Fonds. She actively participates in international exhibitions; her work has been to Venice Biennale, Beijing Photo Biennale, MAXXI, Art Rotterdam, W139, etc. Jessie is based in Amsterdam and Shanghai.
