Artist Statement

Educational psychologist Jerome S. Bruner once said: “We are storytelling creatures, and as children, we acquire language to tell those stories that we have inside us.” Story making as a way of meaning-making has always been the foundation of my creative project; it opens a doorway to my imagination from where I continuously approach and re-encounter my inner self. In the narrative, I reconstruct the materials of my daily observation, along with my emotions, memories and embodied knowledge to transform them into the new experience.

In my childhood my mother was often sitting next to me, knitting with a bundle of wool on her shoulder and telling me stories, at that moment the faraway narration seemed to take its form in the knitting hands, and a certain kind of "touch" was imprinted in my imagination and memory. Later I realized that telling is not always about word and language but involves all sensations of the body. Weaving, sewing, and embroidery have also become my “language." Many years later, I realized that the creative experience I pursue in my art practice: the narrative through time, space, and materials; the internal communication between people; the live experience through imagination and reality, perhaps all related to this childhood memory.

I always look for the intimacy and happiness I had with my mother knitting and telling the story, in the time of such incredible new media extension that reshapes the way people interact, how do we regain the live, visceral, face to face experience between people? Can the narrative become a medium of communication? How to create the narrative that people can have the story themselves, and how to bring the authority to them to act, to express and to create? I brought this question into my art practice. Recently, I have been exploring an improvised, participatory way of storytelling - in the streets, communities, cities, or any public space that allows the narrative to happen in the people.

In my recent project “Thread Play," the children are invited to fill the “blank page" that I left in the story with their imagination and experience, they become the promoters and decision makers of the story. The thread I use as a material, and a “transitional medium” stretches into a larger social context, facilitating children/participants to explore the human body, space, and relatedness with their bodies and actions; As a creator, I am also a facilitator and participant, at the same time participants also became narrators who are taking action and creating.

I think that in a media-saturated world where the relationship between people are increasingly atomized, art making needs to present not only a result but also a transitional process, that as a tool and medium it can open more possibilities for the others.

柳盈川

艺术创作者，设计师，教育工作者

毕业于中国中央美术学院 - 视觉传达设计

英国皇家艺术学院 - 综合媒介纺织设计

任教于中国美术学院

Yingchuan Liu

Artist, Designer, Educator

BA China Central Academy of Fine Art (Beijing)

MA Royal College of Art (London)

‌Lecturer, China Academy of Art‌

@ / yingchuanliu@me.com