-- Artist statement
Plastic Wings draws on the ancient Greek myth of Daedalus and Icarus. For a period of time following the COVID-19 pandemic, I re-entered the shopping mall in Shanghai and saw many man-made landscapes. Fragility and permanence, predicament and expectation, all kinds of complex and contradictory feelings bound together like the wings of Icarus, which symbolise not only hope but also inevitable destruction. With such feelings, on the one hand, I frequently walked into the mall, on the other hand, I also began to re-examine my surrounding environment (both physical and psychological). In the process of shooting photos and looking at archive negatives I collected, the line between reality and illusion began to dissolve. As time passed, pictures began to overlap. Leaving only emotion that lingered in the labyrinth of structure.
Shi Yan (b. 1998, Buenos Aires, Argentina). His ancestry can be traced back to Fuqing, a coastal city in Fujian Province, China. In the context of China's reform and opening-up in the 1990s, his parents went to Argentina for doing business (1994). With the economic, political and social crisis of Argentina, he returned to China with his parents at the beginning of the 21st century. Yan Shi has moved to many different Chinese cities with his family since the return. His work takes personal experience as the starting point, and makes images to explore the extensiveness and distinctiveness of individual experience in the public spheres.
