Ying Xing

Ying Xing is a digital and fashion-based textile artist based in London with a background in arts administration. Her CV entails participation in public installations with Cat Village Rural Revitalisation, OMNI ART EXPO in Shanghai, and curating a solo exhibition on artist Yuk-ki Lee at MOU PROJECTS in Hong Kong. She currently works as a Creative Operations Manager at the London Art Collective. 

The digital art and fashion-based textiles of Ying Xing are interconnected as one practice, because her fashionable wares and textile fragments are often based on her digital designs. These compositions focus on emotional impulse and how color as well as shape define form and how they impact the audience. Ying Xing regards color as the defining attribute of her work because they define heighted emotions, and particularly, the designs are meant to uplift the viewer with lively moods. The use of black in the art is meant to convey a heavy presence which anchors and also reflects somber feelings as well as melancholy expressions. There is a deep sociological observation in her work which cynically portrays the surface appearance and impressions the public population puts up versus the layers underneath.

We will find the graphics in Ying Xing digital and textile works are essentially a conveyance of ordinary objects and the friends who surround her. Items such as a cup, comb, clutter on a shelf, become enlarged and stylized in her colorful compositions. The childlike, informal linearity in the works are meant to reflect a sense of improvisation and imperfection. With flatness, the shapes are treated as weighted surfaces which feel impactful. Also, she often is inspired by Chinese characters as pictures rather than abstract signs. The digital designs typically turn into prints or screen prints and even onto fabric, stickers, napkins, and everyday objects. Ying Xing will even create characters with her design, such as ‘Dark-Circle Flower’, a tired-eye small flower.

With immense curvature and stylization of the forms, Ying Xing’s works seem inspired by art from the early 20th century and even from the Art Deco period. We will find a serene pleasure within the digital and textile works, as if these were a grand form of escapism within alternative media processes. The immense flatness of the works give the forms a fixed presence which seem delicate and casual, as if these entities were sifting through immense bodies of water. This aquatic appearance to the works make the compositions and forms lively with engaging purpose and fluidity. 

In essence, the portfolio of Ying Xing represents essentials perfected. Her minimalist approach to graphic depictions represents a sense of joy, yet grounded within the confines of psychological reality through complex color decisions and formations. These delicate yet robust forms reveal color as a visual language in alternative media, particularly through the lens of digitization and fashion-based contexts. Such alternative practices gives deeper purpose to color-formulated image-making as a deeper expression beyond the confines of the brush and traditional surfaces. Ying Xing brings a sense of fragile delicacy and refinement to portraying formations beyond representation and removed from total abstraction. This in-between realm of image-making reveals a dichotomy between experimentation in alternative practices based in reinterpreting historical notions of design elements within the context of psychological impulses.