Untamed Architecture

 

The NFTs of 'Untamed Architecture' series is available on OpenSea now ->

Untamed Architecture _ NFTs OpenSea

https://opensea.io/collection/untamed-architecture

Untamed Architecture _ Tiny living organisms’s houses in the city
single-channel video taken using an electron microscope _ 2020-2021
Installation View @ Soma Art Space Berlin, 2021
Photo by Marc Doradzillo

If the resin collection presents a perspective from above-ground, that is, a kind of a bird´s eye view, Yang´s latest exploration in video art flips the vantage point around.  Yang presents a group of 4 different videos that are projected on the walls over 2-storey high in the gallery space.   With a microscope camera extended from her camera, the artist surveilled into the cracks and holes in walls around the Berlin neighborhoods.  What appears to be static image, with sometime shadowy or almost unnoticeable motion within the frame is the natural/ urban homes of insects.  In the one of the videos, one experiences moment of shock even without entomophobia. When the dweller of hole-in-the-wall is blown to larger-than-life scale and shows itself up in the eyes of beholders/ intruders, the in-your-face greeting at once shakes the viewer´s ground, who finds herself being pushed down the rabbit hole.  Humbled by the little-fella, one cannot help but reflect on our “equal footing” with thy neighbor, and by extension, on our (access) right to the land – in small and capital L (with the latter, as the German word Land, the country).

Untamed Architecture _
Installation View @ Soma Art Space Berlin, 2021
Photo by Marc Doradzillo

[Untamed architecture _ single-channel video, 10min, 2020-2021] 
Installation view @ Soma Art Space Berlin 2021

“(…)The «invisible» – as I would call them, in quotation mark. I have long formed this daily routine to start my day by going around my apartment and in my neighborhood. Sometimes I collected materials. Some of them formed part of the ‘Materials’ series.

There’s always a delightful discovery, sometimes through the microscope lends, that there are so many neighbors in my apartment block. For example, spiders and those nameless little plants seem to be happy to share our space. That is less likely the case when it comes to people-to-people relationships. In Seoul, I spent my weekends breaking into construction sites and painted on the walls of the to-be torn down buildings. (…)

(…)During these trespasses, I found that there were still residents remaining in their homes, actually living right at the construction site. They refused to move, nor did they have the money to. The compensation the land developers offered was not enough for them to relocate. A combination of reasons led me to the encounter between me in the transitory space and the people who have their life and living memory planted in that space.”

- Artist interview by Agnus Tam / Meanwhile Elsewhere , May 2021

Work in Progress 

Untamed Architecture 
Tiny living organisms’s houses in the city
single-channel video taken using an electron microscope _ 2020-2021

Movies on Vimeo -> 
https://vimeo.com/user5082857