Yanice Yang
Yanice Yang (Liuqingqing Yang) is an interactive graphic-based artist working as a human-computer interaction researcher and product designer in the San Francisco Bay area. She has a background in fashion design and is an expert in code-based computing and motion-graphics.
The graphic-based interactive cards of Yanice Yang entail subtle motion graphics which seem to glide, as opposed to follow, the guided hand of the viewer. Not all of her works contain these motion-graphic elements, but the ones which do are mesmerizingly enchanted experiences. Using WebGL, Three.js, and p5.js coding, Yanice Yang creates a distinctive interactive experience by fusing a combination of technology and art. This interdisciplinary approach is experimental not so much in the advancement or technicalities of the technology proper, but rather in a conceptual approach of advancing design into an element which can be experiential and not strictly a fixed-in-time entity. In such a regard, the works of Yanice Yang cannot only be considered as graphic-based or motion-graphic-based works, but also experimental moving-images.
Most notably, in pieces such as Glint Curtain and Blue Hour Calendar, luminous light-design-like effects are manipulated by the motion of the audience. Bending, gliding, meshing, the elements seem to merge, pull, and sparkle to the whims of our imagination. Often linear or web-like, these types of pieces enchant as much as mystify the audience in a child-like wonder which seems as an authentic aesthetic and conceptual experience. The conceptual approach of such works entails an embodiment of light as a motivational factor. Much like the cosmos, these celestial works glow and glisten against dark or often monochromatic surfaces and subtly interact with our guiding hand, like a silent shooting star which follows the whims of our imagination. With such observations, these ‘God-like’ traits invoke a sense of not only mysticism, but also apparitional qualities which invokes us to reach towards the metaphorical heavens.
What we can gather from the interactive graphic works of Yanice Yang would be how technology and interdisciplinary practices can expand our understanding not only of the arts, but also an enhancement of empiricism. These sensory motion-graphics are not simply animations, they are small screen-based wonders with conceptual notions of subtle light design and sparkle like diamonds or sea glass reflecting in sunlight or in water. Such aquatic and celestial elements essentially define these magical card-like graphics as much serve as a metaphor for the expansion of creative engagement, a sort of technological and interdisciplinary form of enlightenment and advanced empirical philosophy.
Through forms which seem like galactic curtains to fields of grass which shimmer and sparkle to glowing cocoons and spider-like webs, these forms are ‘pulled’ into formations of new digital physiology through the whims of our imagination. We should bask not only in their nature-inspired sense of motion-graphics and aesthetic design, but also in their conceptual ruminations of revealing secrets based in digitized experiences which are authentic and as naturally inspired as an astronomer gazing at the cosmos through their telescope or observatory.
