I am a visual artist working primarily with photography, which serves as the ground from which I engage in self-examination and critique. I work with silver gelatin processes, where photosensitive materials allow images to function not merely as representations, but as residues of time imprinted on a surface. My practice constructs image fields in which memory, time, and space interweave, enabling the past to reattach itself to the present as trace rather than as a linear narrative.
My work is deeply rooted in my experience of growing up in my hometown. For me, it is not simply a small town in southern China. Its landscapes are no longer merely natural forms, but nonlinear structures through which memory continually returns and reactivates.
My images do not reproduce the past; they are residues constantly refracted and rewritten within consciousness.
I approach photography as a liminal condition through which time becomes perceptible, allowing visual experience and personal experience to interact within the image rather than being fixed as representations of reality.
© Guodong Yan