Plastic wings are taken from the ancient Greek myth “Dedalus and Icarus”, which is an investigation of the self-positioning of individuals in history. For a period of time after COVID-19, I re-entered the shopping mall in Shanghai and then saw many man-made landscapes. Fragility and permanence, predicament and expectation, all kinds of complex and contradictory feelings merge together, like the wings of Icarus, which not only contains hope but also symbolizes some kind of 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 watching the archive negatives which i collected, the line between reality and illusion began to vague, and the pictures which as time sections began to overlap, Only leaving the emotions that hovered in the labyrinth of structure.
Shi Yan (b. 1998, Buenos Aires, Argentina) lives and works in Milan Italy and Shanghai China. 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. Shi Yan has moved to many different Chinese cities with his family since the return.
Because of the complex living environment and the learning experience of philosophy (especially Frankfurt School). 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.