Xiaofei Yue

My work is in response to the cultural diversity that I experienced in London. Through experimenting with different media, I am trying to question the education and propaganda I received in China.

I was born in 1986 in a generation referred to as the “Chinese post 80’s”; the first generation to be raised under the “one child policy” and tremendous social changes of “reform and opening” in the 1980s. At school, the education we received had been influenced by leftist ideologies inherited from the Cultural Revolution, meanwhile with the prevalence of the Internet, scholars introduced human rights issues and democracy were exposed to us as an alternative to communism. Under the influence of such factors, our generation’s cultural identity became a complex issue. On the one hand, what we accepted in school was an idealistic, very traditional leftist education; on the other hand, due to accessible resources shared in the information age, we were also deeply affected by a lot of modern Western society thought. So perhaps we all had a somewhat skeptical spirit deep in our hearts. When I came to London, this skeptical spirit was somehow activated and exaggerated. I began to seriously dwell on the differences instigated by what I had learned in childhood education and what I had observed in the “real world.” I repeatedly tried to express how I felt about experiencing different cultural influences, and continuously explored simplified aesthetic in practice. The latest series of my work, Mental, revolves around the struggle I experienced when confronted with different cultures. The entirely new foreign environment motivated me to learn the basics of every aspect of life. However, I struggled with an immediate psychological conflict that arose between being a civilised, well-educated individual in China and becoming an ignorant, ill-mannered foreigner here. For a significant period of time, I struggled with expressing myself and thus encountered several hindrances such as misinterpreting socio-cultural norms and customs. In terms of cultural differences, the most difficult aspect was not merely information overload, but also newly acquired information which conflicted with everything I had previously learned. Subsequently, I became somewhat schizophrenic. In my works, the small mentally disturbed boy, the dying animals, and the young man with a bleeding head, all symbolize such kind of unhealthy mind, and through adopting different paint media ( acrylic, watercolour, self-made paint etc.), I was trying to acquire a melancholic and pathological tone and create a peculiar sense of trauma.