Art Within Reach

Artist / Zhang Yitong

Zhang Yitong, independent artist, is currently employed as an Artist-in-Residence at the Glasgow School of Art, UK. She completed her Masters in Jewellery & Metal at the Royal College of Art, during which her dissertation with distinction has been collected by the RCA library. Before that, Yitong graduated from the Glasgow School of Art with a first-class honours Bachelor’s degree, also travelling for an academic exchange to the California College of the Arts.

In the object-making context that has been monopolized by efficiency and scale, this project focuses on the discussion on the characteristics of craft, keeping exploring an intertextual method of creation between poetry and jewellery, as well as the interaction between these two incompletely homogeneous mediums.

Jewellery is A Poem is Yitong’s transdisplinary practice collaborated with six well-known Chinese poets. This project started from Yitong’s videos of the making process of two rings (a handmade silver ring and a 3D-printed PLA ring), which were sent to the invited poets later as a stereoscopic inspiration, during which the process and results of creation are brewed in the mind as an emotional metaphor and exposed through words. Then Yitong recreated works based on the eight poems received from the six poets.

This piece of work melts and recasts a second-hand diamond ring purchased from a pawnshop into a label, which is often attached to second-hand jewellery, and is with the text message, ‘A Diamond (which is the real diamond on the ring) is Forever’engraved on it. Yitong presents it with the jewellery box and pawnshop packaging, trying to discuss the conflict between the true life cycle of the diamond ring and its symbolism.

Digitalogy is inspired by the forms of the broken models caused by the wrong order that is accidentally used while building models with 3D software, which could not actually be printed. Through making up and realising these dramatic and unpredictable incorrect forms which have been rejected, and which the digital system tries to exclude through craft and transforming them into an aesthetic principle, Yitong provides a possible response to the question-What is the next generation of objects created by traditional craft and digital technology, human hand and machine? Yitong aims to offer a point of view in thinking about the potential development of traditional craft in the digital environment, as well as the context for a discussion about the dialogue between the logic of digital technology and human.

This collection of works is titled by the dates they were made and focuses on exploring the relationship between object, material, and poetry. Yitong attempts to create objects that refuse words, with the poetry completely belonging to themselves in the way of the paradox between de-symbolisation and the retaining of functionality. Through contrasting, exchanging, and combining the language characteristics of poetry and objects, Yitong tries to investigate the poetic and abstract narrative of metal objects through these works.

Exhibitions

Yitong's works has been participated in multiple international exhibitions such as Silver Triennial International, Deutsches Goldschmiedehaus, China International Contemporary Metal Art Exhibition, The Extraordinary Ordinary-Contemporary Craft Exhibition, the Beijing International Jewellery Art Exhibition, Itami International Jewellery Exhibition, Japan, London Craft Week, and Beijing Design Week, etc. In 2021, Yitong held a transdisciplinary exhibition, ‘Jewellery is a Poem’, in Beijing, in which she collaborated with six well-known Chinese poets, Chun Shu, Nan Ren, Qi Zi, Sheng Xing, Wei Huan, Xidu Heshang.

Awards

Yitong has won two Goldsmiths’ Craft & Design Council Awards, New Designers: Goldsmiths’ Company Silversmithing Award, the Behrens Foundation Bursary Award, and Visual Arts Scotland Award, has been nominated for the Outstanding Student of the Year Award, and others.

This article is sourced from Zhang Yitong Studio.