“When words fail, art speaks.”
Qingyang He is an interdisciplinary new media art practitioner, HCI (Human-Computer Interaction) researcher, and VJ. Her practice and research sit at the intersections of computational design, live audiovisual interactive performance, user interface design of applied XR technologies, and HAI (Human-AI) co-creative systems.
She freely crosses the boundaries of academic research and artistic activity and is dedicated to exploring the notion of ‘motive-driven’ arts and her philosophy of love via consistent creative practices.
Based on speculation of the idea of ‘concept-driven’ art practices which are popularly embraced among the academia and the institutional framework of contemporary art, Qingyang proposed the counter notion of ‘motive-driven’ art practices. She was deeply influenced by and further developed ‘the nearby (fujin in Chinese) theory’ by Xiang Biao, in which he suggested a way of perceiving the world by taking ‘the nearby’ as a lived space where one encounters people with diverse backgrounds on a regular basis. According to this sociological theory, Qingyang put it forward into her creative practice guidelines. If applied in an artist’s practices, such a central scope could enable nuanced understandings of reality and facilitate the birth of ‘motives’ towards social relations and actions. Thus, she concluded the notion as ‘motive-driven’ art practice, advocating that as an artist, she should firstly become an active individual who cares about the ‘events’ happening around her in everyday embodied experiences and devotes herself to artistic expression that focuses on real-world issues. Hopefully, this novel creative manifesto could become a countering force against the current proliferation of tedious, theory-heavy artworks which restricted the artists’ creativity within the systematic framework of ‘The White Boxes’ and prevented the dialectic dynamics between the art, audiences, and the creatives.
Furthermore, she believes in and constantly practices the philosophy of love in her arts. In Byung-Chul Han’s definition, love is all about "being able not to be able". To her, to love is an act of anti-meritocratic empowerment in the current commercialized society, which is similar to the notion of art if taking off the commodity attributes and values of artworks. Therefore, she encouraged authentic love and care to others as the motive of her artistic expression.
The subjects and subtitles of Qingyang's work encompass the following: investigation on how emerging technology systems and techno-culture arouse societal issues and influence modern lifestyles, constant attempt to challenge boundaries of ‘interfaces’ in the digital era and to shift the existing interface design patterns, the analogy between computation and nature, and the mediation of more flexible technical infrastructure and more embodied transmedia experiences via various digital media. The mediums used range from classic cinematographic technique, to experimental text-based genre which combines creative writing and performance art, to emerging digital media, including physical computation, audiovisual interaction, generative AI systems, and XR technologies. Through works in a variety of forms, she dedicates to questioning the given disciplinary and instrumental ways of creation and empowering her beloved ones and the contemporary world with the organic synthesis of design, media, and art.