Shi Yan – Plastic Wings

Plastic Wings draws on the ancient Greek myth of Daedalus and Icarus. For a period of time following the COVID-19 pandemic, I re-entered the shopping mall in Shanghai and saw many man-made landscapes. Fragility and permanence, predicament and expectation, all kinds of complex and contradictory feelings bound together like the wings of Icarus, which symbolise not only hope but also inevitable destruction. With such feelings, on the one hand, I frequently walked into the mall, on the other hand, I also began to re-examine my surrounding environment (both physical and psychological). In the process of shooting photos and looking at archive negatives I collected, the line between reality and illusion began to dissolve. As time passed, pictures began to overlap. Leaving only emotion that lingered in the labyrinth of structure.

Shi Yan (b. 1998, Buenos Aires, Argentina) lives and works between Milan and Shanghai. His ancestry can be traced back to Fuqing, a coastal city in Fujian Province, China. With China’s reform and opening-up in the 1990s, his parents travelled to Argentina to do business, before returning in the early 2000s due to the various the economic, political, and social crises. Since his return to China, Shi Yan and his family have lived in many different cities. His years of constant movement and his studies of the Frankfurt School of philosophy have led to an interest in subjectivity and the experience of the individual in the public sphere.