Yao Qingmei was born in Wenzhou in 1982. She graduated from Limoges-Aubusson in 2011, before receiving a master’s degree from Villa Arson, Nice, France in 2013.
Interview Excerpt :
- Could you explain the concept of this project?
- When making tripods (a three-legged pottery vessel) for my earlier exhibition in 2012, I became fascinated by the diverse patterns on ancient pottery vessels. At that time, I was creating tripods with different patterns that were similar with those cultural relics from famous excavation sites. Also, I used a tripod in one of my performance works in 2013. I believe that patterns such as flowers and birds as well as other geometrical signs were evolved from realistic images in ancient times, which embody certain meanings. Before creating Professor Yao, I tried to making vessels with the “wan” character. I started to study the sickle and hammer sign in 2013.
Tripods can be treated as a symbol of power. If we ignore its political meaning, we can also understand the sign from a semiotic perspective. You may notice that it is a geometrical pattern. For example, the “hammer” seems like a straight line. Certainly, the metaphor is concealed in my project. For me, as an artist, I am not a professor and the aim of this project is impossible to be studied only from the perspective of archeology or historiography. The entire programme includes multidisciplinary analysis. Professor Yao is a character I created, but the information she conveys is not fabricated but logically synthesized from a huge amount of archaeological data. This is the same case as my book.
Additionally, exploring the connections through research materials can be seen the most creative part of this project. Eventually, there are myriad coincidences just like the transformation of the meaning of the “wan” character. Some of them are true, but some others are absurd. For example, the pronunciation of the sickle and hammer symbol as “wu” is something deduced by me.
- Is it difficult to reproduce the entire research process in the form of an exhibition?
- Actually, it is much easier for me to deal with information through an exhibition. This project starts from collecting a large amount of data, and it is hard to organize and present them using a linear logic like a lecture or a book, which usually guides audiences to acquire information from point A to point B. An installation, however, it is able to show the process of transformation.
When immersed in the space, there is no doubt that the sickle and hammer sign can be seen as the core. All the extended information derives from this centre point. For me, it is clearer and more vivid to present the entire fragmented research process in a reticulate pattern like this.
- Some information delivered in this exhibition is not factually correct, however, it seems like reasonable when being placed in your scientific deduction.
- That is why this project is interesting. We are surrounded by symbols all the time and being forced to face them. To some extent, it is a kind of violence. We receive the information that symbols deliver to us constantly until they become a meaningless sign. We are immersed in this context and sometimes we even ignore the actual meaning of the signs. How, therefore, can we understand symbols from a new perspective? My project explores how a symbol is legitimized and politicized, as
the example of C.G. Jung’s Collective Unconscious. In the course of humanity’s social development, we own a primitive collective memory. The transformation of the “wan” character provides a typical example. By doing research for this project, I am also increasingly interested in the effects and influence of mysticism.
