10 Questions with Yahan Wang

Yahan Wang is a digital artist, visual designer, and curator currently based in New York and was born in Wuhan, China. She works on digital images, motion graphics, and interactive videos, which are generated from coding. Yahan developed her interest in digital and new media art when she went to Sarah Lawrence College as an undergrad. In the meantime, Yahan co-curated a group exhibition in Shanghai in 2021 and curated another feminine-themed group show in New York in March 2023. Yahan also works at Artnet as a Business Development Coordinator, which excites her to explore all aspects of the art market and the design perspective of advertising campaigns. While also having an arts administration background, Yahan has kept exploring being a ‘multitasker’ in the art industry who can curate, consult, design, and connect.

@yahanwangg

ARTIST STATEMENT

Yahan's digital image works have explored glitch aesthetics and how the glitch culture challenges the idea of 'perfect design' in most digital media production. The glitch aesthetics embrace unpredictability, irregularity, and the potential of accidental performance. Yahan wants her work to produce new ways for viewers to use and perceive images through technologies and machines. In most of her works, Yahan embraces the randomness and irregularity brought by the machines and tries to achieve harmony and agreement in the composition. Yahan's favorite series of her digital work is Glitch It, which is composed of two sets, RED and PORTRAIT.

INTERVIEW

First of all, why are you an artist, and when did you first decide to become one? 

The artist part of me started from my undergraduate study at Sarah Lawrence College. My concentration was mostly on the study of economics and art history at first. Since our school is located in New York, I had the privilege to view all avant-garde exhibitions in visual arts. Being exposed to such a strong art scene, I wanted to start making art myself. I would say I shifted toward an artist without even realizing or planning. The first medium I explored was black and white photography. While taking a photography history course, I was completely drawn to how strong a story could be told and seen in just black and white, especially compared to the digital era we're living in. Ironically, as I was exploring the traditional medium of the film camera, I came across curiosity over the digital art-making process and wanted to see the difference in expression between those mediums. That was the start of my producing digital art from programming and developing further on creating and expressing my reflections as an artist.  

What is your personal aim as an artist?

Being able to produce and create as an artist brought so much inspiration and excitement to my life personally. Creating a new series or a piece of work is never something rational that you could implement like the other part of your life. You need to involve yourself to generate your feelings or thoughts into something visual. I hope I never lose the part of myself being an artist and keep producing works that could bring in a new way of expression and provoke people to have an interest in learning more or just pass along a piece of excitement to them.  

How did your practice evolve over the years? And how would you define yourself as an artist today?

Working on black and white photography was more like a focus on documenting my surroundings and happenings in my life at that moment. I wasn't looking to boldly express any artistic vision or aesthetic fantasy at that time. I honestly never pictured myself producing new media or digital work when working with film cameras, a more traditional way of making. I used to carry the camera around and spent tons of time in the darkroom to figure out how to make the image come out better. Working in programming to produce digital work is completely different and opposed to the slow process of developing an image in the darkroom. You make the order, and then the computer generates the image for you. When the computer does its part of the work, you need to be prepared and open to whatever result it might give you instead of you being the one taking full control when producing photographs. I'm happy to see how my practice evolved these years, moving from a conservative to a bold way of inner expression and being more open-minded as well. 

You primarily work with digital art. What are the aspects that you prefer about this technique?

It was a new world for me at first. I never knew anything about coding, but I was amazed by the flexibility of this way of making art. It's a challenge to start learning about coding and producing art based on that. Different from other mediums, you don't need a studio to produce, but all you need is a computer. 

What is your creative process like? And how did you evolve this way of working?

I started with just producing graphic images through coding, then moving toward exploring interactive video, 3D models, and then incorporating photographs within them. The creative process is like making experimental tests or running a hypothesis. You need to keep testing out which equation or values can give you the best result you want.  

Your work is influenced by glitch aesthetics and glitch culture, as you mention in your statement. Can you tell us more about these concepts? And how do you incorporate them into your work?

Glitch aesthetics is about embracing the unexpectancy brought by the machine. The software may generate elements of unpredictability, irregularity, and the potential of accidental performance to your work. The glitch culture challenges the idea of 'perfect design,' a standard set for most digital media production. The series of 'Glitch It' is an experiment I did on pixel sorting two photographs I took. I kept specific parts of the photograph when writing the codes and then added randomness to some values for the machine to generate so that you would not exactly know what image would be presented as a result. These images are a composition with accidental performance but also try to achieve harmony and agreement as a whole. This series of glitch works aims to present a new way for viewers to perceive an image. 

At the moment, there is a huge debate around authorship and art creation, especially in relation to AI and digital products. Where do you stand on this issue?

Even if the work I produced heavily relied on the machine to generate the image for me, I'm ultimately the one who takes control and decides on what kind of aesthetics or artistic vision I want my work to present or want the machine to produce. The software and computer are tools for me to do all these, simply working as a brush for a painter. I personally think AI cannot replicate the ideology and methodology you delicately put on for your artwork as a human being. Your artistic vision can only come from you as an artist. Nothing can replace that.  

You also work for ARTNET as a Business Development Coordinator. What do you think about the art community and market? And how did your perception change over the years?

There was increased attention over emerging artists and female artists in the market these years, which is something I'm glad to see since I think these are the reflection of showing the market becoming more vibrant. When I was at school studying art history, my approach to art was to just learn and analyze the academic story of a work, but now closely involving myself in the market shifted my attention to the market potential of a work and have more thinking over how different participants in the market may react to this work. 

As you are both an artist yourself and a market expert, where do you see the market going in the near future? Will we see a resurgence in NFTs? And what other trends do you foresee? 

I'm looking forward to seeing the art community and market move toward being more diverse and fluid under the influence of technology. With the occurrence of the pandemic, people are getting more used to virtual things. Galleries, fairs, and auction houses started trying out online exhibitions, online viewing rooms, and online auctions. I think this part of technology development in art organizations will last and continue working as a strong auxiliary to the business. 
Regarding NFTs, I think it may not just be an issue of whether there will be a resurgence of NFTs art, but how NFTs art will interact with other sectors in the NFTs ecosystem and web3 in larger. The positive side I see is that the NFTs ecosystem might support bringing through partnerships between art and other industries. To me, NFTs are like a separate division that has its path of growth and development in art, and I think people's interest in the combination of technology and art will support it to keep developing no matter if it's a positive or negative direction to you. 

And lastly, what are you working on now, and what are your plans for the future? Anything exciting you can tell us about?

I'm working on hosting a series of TEDx talks. I want to bring in speakers sharing provoking and inspiring thoughts about art, culture, technology, and maybe more. I'll also keep doing curation projects, graphic designs, and producing my digital work. Being able to work from multiple perspectives in the art industry is the hugest excitement for me!