Arts Thread

Jingyan Yu is a Chinese born illustrator and visual storyteller currently living in London. She studied Fashion Design as an undergraduate at Tsinghua University, graduating in 2015. With a background in costume and visual communication, she gradually developed a romantic and uninhibited style of artistic painting. At the same time, her illustrations use mixed media to depict moments that originate in everyday life.She creates non-linear illustrated narratives, taking real experiences into metaphysical spaces to open a dialogue with the viewer. Science Fiction and Romanticism are key sensations in the work. Recently I have been experimenting with combinations of traditional printmaking (specifically etching and letterpress) and digital image making.‘Lost, Navigating’ is a visual narrative that focuses on the technological disturbance of birds’ migratory and humans’ navigational perceptions. The project intersects two broad, current and pressing issues in climate change and artificial intelligence technology. The narrative breaks down into three parts — The Migratory Bird Disorientation Archive, Incidents of Navigational Failure and Virtual Teleportation — each a series of illustrations in a circular dialogue between past, present and future across time and space, provoking the philosophical questions: Where are we? What is real? The points and route maps in Google Navigation are exaggerated metaphors – while clues of migratory birds from the past loom large in the images, creating a non-linear narrative with a sense of ambiguity between the real and the virtual. The gradual change from colour to black and white suggests the opening of a narrative of the past – a circular 'lost dialogue' that opens the curtain.