Urban & Individual
Living in a large metropolitan city can be exciting and invigorating. Unfortunately, the fast-paced lifestyle and constant pressure of working and making enough money to survive can have adverse effects on your mental and psychical health. Photographer Yuqi Wang responds with humorous photography, exploring how our behaviour and consciousness will eventually conform to this invisible prison.
Text & Photography Yuqi Wang
Urban & Individual is a project using performance and photography to address the phenomenon of people struggling with visible and invisible discipline and stress in their urban life. I invited performers to the urban space and photographed performers’ body language and interactions with the environment and the objects in the space.
I grew up in northern China in the late 1990s and lived in several metropolitans, such as Beijing, Shanghai, and New York City. I am intrigued by the expansion of urban landscape and fast-paced modern life, and how these developments and changes affect individual's life mentally and physically. The contiguous residential community, skyscrapers, and busy transportation are common in any urban scene, which gives people a strong sense of oppression. I am fascinated by it while having a feeling of void. The non-stop and high-speed operations in the expansive urban landscape produce and consume a huge volume of material constantly, meanwhile, each individual is so vulnerable and powerless situated within this running machine.
There are many social issues raised from this fast-paced urban life, such as 996 (a popular working mode in China which refers to working from 9 am to 9 pm 6 days a week), the high rent rate, and high employment pressure. In this project, I will shed light on these issues and how they affect each individual.
This project also discusses how urban space and infrastructure discipline individual’s behaviour and consciousness. People usually follow common sense without any doubt or consider if it is reasonable. The urban infrastructure does bring convenience to daily life, but they are also like an invisible box that constrains people to place themselves inside, and people gradually adapt to it until living without it. Eventually, the conveniences become a shackle that binds people tightly. In my works, I use a humorous and metaphorical approach to amplify the impact of these rules and norms on individual's life as a revealing and a challenge.
“The contiguous residential community, skyscrapers, and busy transportation are common in any urban scene, which gives people a strong sense of oppression.”
About Yuqi
Yuqi Wang is photographer and artist based in New York / Shanghai. With eight years fine art background, her practice operates the boundary of Fashion Photography, Video Art, Performance and Costume. Yuqi’s images and videos explore the potential relationship of what she has to work with – models, clothing, props and sets, and a certain space. Yuqi believes photo and video has never been the ending point, it is an access route to other things.
Yuqi's work discusses the relationship between individual and society, and the rules of running of world. Her thoughts are often rooted in modernity / cultural identity / common sense / impact of technologies / boundary / body / space / scale / urban & natural environment / relationship of people / subtle emotions of individuals.
To see more of her work, visit her website or follow her on Instagram
READ NEXT
