‘Psychic scars’: how non-binary Australian-Chinese artist Meng-Yu Yan’s works are often haunted by ghosts of the past
- Exploring both ancient and contemporary Chinese culture, Meng -Yu Yan’s works have been exhibited to acclaim around Australia over the past few months
- One of the artist’s latest series involves self-portraits incised with lines and shapes in an attempt to physically represent psychological scars
As a child growing up in Sydney, artist Meng-Yu Yan wanted to fit in. “I wanted to be your classic, white, beachy Aussie person with blonde hair and blue eyes,” says Yan, whose parents immigrated to Australia from China in the 1980s.
It was only on a university visit to Tianjin in northeast China that Yan, who identifies as non-binary and uses the pronouns they and them, fully embraced their heritage. A non-binary identity is one that is not solely male or female.
“My parents are very traditional and my idea of China had come from them, but on this trip in 2014 I met lots of inspiring young artists making really interesting work, people who were pushing boundaries. It showed me a different side to China,” Yan says.
Since then, Yan has made photographs, videos and installations that explore both ancient and contemporary Chinese culture.
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“It’s a process of decolonising my own mind – trying to get access to ideas outside of Western philosophy, literature and art history,” says Yan. Much of Yan’s work also explores their own experience of being caught between East and West, and non-binary.
Over the past few months, their work has been exhibited to acclaim around Australia. They were a finalist in the National Photographic Portrait Prize at the National Portrait Gallery in Canberra; were highly commended in the biennial Olive Cotton Award for photography at Tweed Regional Gallery in New South Wales; and had a solo show at the Australian Centre on China in the World at the Australian National University, also in Canberra.
Their work has been featured in multiple exhibitions in and around Sydney, including at Mosman Art Gallery, where an installation made in collaboration with the artist Anna May Kirk is on display until December 3.
One of their latest series, Just Another Ruin, is partly inspired by the Chinese art of paper cutting, which dates back millennia. For this series, Yan takes photographic self-portraits, prints them, then cuts into the paper, incising their face with lines and shapes.
Cutting into the photographs is an attempt to physically represent psychological scars.
“My parents grew up during the Cultural Revolution,” says Yan. “My great-grandfather was a landlord who lost everything during the Cultural Revolution and decided to end his life.
“I think there are psychic scars that are passed down through families that you carry, even though you might not be aware of exactly what happened. A lot of these stories are unspoken or hidden – there’s a lot of ghosts in family history.”
Ghosts haunt much of Yan’s work.
Many of their photographs use water, mirrors or flashes of light to suggest a supernatural presence lurking in the image, and some series refer directly to ghost stories.
The title of Yan’s exhibition “Heaven; Just Another Ruin”, at Dominik Mersch Gallery in Sydney earlier this year was taken from a 2005 short story, Grave of the Fireflies, by the Chinese science-fiction author Cheng Jingbo, which follows an orphaned girl in a post-apocalyptic world filled with supernatural beings.
Qiu left behind a novel, Last Words from Montmartre, a semi-autobiographical diary of her final days. Yan mirrored Qiu exactly in age at the time, as well as in ethnicity, sexuality and gender identity, and visited the same places on the same dates Qiu had.
Yan made a series of video diaries documenting the similarities and differences between their experiences and Qiu’s, illustrating the cyclical nature of history while also shining a light on the life and work of a queer figure from the past.
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Yan also makes ghostly installations inspired by shadow puppetry, which is said to have been invented in the court of Emperor Wu in Han dynasty China. The emperor is said to have been grieving the death of a beloved concubine, which inspired his courtiers to invent shadow plays as a method of temporarily bringing her back to life.
Yan’s installations, such as Shadow Shrine and Black Butterfly, fill rooms with the shadows of puppets that Yan makes by hand, then loosely hangs on string in front of beams of light. The cut-outs sway as visitors walk past, or in any draught that enters the room, creating moving images on the walls.
Although these are technically installations, Yan describes these works as “emerging” from photography because they use the same fundamental elements of light and shadow to create an image.
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Yan thinks photography is a particularly interesting medium through which to explore the supernatural.
Today, photography is widely relied upon as the most accurate way to record reality: photographs are printed in newspapers to document events and are relied upon as evidence in court. But when photography was invented in the 19th century, it was seen by some as a form of magic.
From the 1850s through to the 1920s, unscrupulous professional photographers used tricks to take images that appeared to feature ghosts. In the latter part of that period, the development of X-rays genuinely made visible what was previously invisible.
Yan is interested in this tension between fact and fiction in photography.
“In history, there was a sense that photography allowed you to see things that were invisible,” says Yan. “And if you look at image making now, with AI it’s so far from reality. Photography is more and more about dream worlds.”
