Yang Yu is a Filmmaker and Visual artist. Emotional narrative is her forte to immerse audiences into the environment of her projects. Her keen eyes on visuals and words make filmmaking her most natural way of expression. However, defining her practice as “film” is not accurate. Design, installation, literature and poetry are fascinatingly converging in her practice. She focuses on female survival problems and psychological state, personal and collective memory, digital natives, marginalized communities, and abandoned areas. Her work has been exhibited at the Het Nieuwe Instituut, V2_ Lab for the Unstable Media and EYEFILM Museum in the Netherlands.
Visible Stitches, Invisible Women - Over time, certain things lose their practical value but remain vital in our lives, becoming vessels for memories, like handcrafted sweaters embodying women's labor and love in families. This is Yang Yu's inspiration for her project.
While women's pivotal role in coding often goes unnoticed, Yang Yu parallels the weaving tradition where women played a significant part. Through "Visible Stitches, Invisible Women," she aims to create an interactive space highlighting women's hidden labor in coding and weaving. She unveils the usually concealed work behind coding by translating hand-knitted sweaters into unique patterns. With her art practice focusing on marginalized groups, Yang uses mixed media to shed light on their stories. At the same time, it's a heartwarming journey; she wants to bring the audience to recall women's emotional and creative contributions in everyday life.
Written in the sand - “Forced to erasing memories - the death of data products”
We are well accustomed to and gradually rely on mobile phones or computers to record our lives and thoughts and become our personal friends and way of life. As people fragment their lives, they break down the events in their lives step by step into data records. For example, a smartphone health monitoring app that records daily physical activity.
Under these conditions, data products are internalized in people's egos. Suppose the memories stored in the human brain can be forgotten or remembered by people's own choices. So, after the personal data and data products as memory carriers are stored on the network, do they still have the user's decision-making power?
What should we do if this data is erased? Personal data loss leads to the loss of stored memories and people's online identities.
This project is informed by my personal stories, real experiences, and accounts of fragmented lives. Explore the attachment relationship between people and deleted Internet data products; under the conditions of accelerated technology and society, why people lose themselves because of the disappearance of data products, and the resulting sense of isolation is still present today in society. And how to fight the forced erasure of memory through the form of film.
