Documenting Cityscapes with Erin Yueying Wang

As an atmospheric night-wanderer, Erin (Yueying) Wang shoots with deep attentiveness of city-life in conjunction with nature. Wang looks closely for a story each city wants to tell. She is extremely intuitive with harsh contrasts and digital warping, as her photographs reflect her profound curiosities about the world around her. Forever chasing stillness in the city, Wang’s introspective self is highlighted in the photographs’ subjectivity and blurriness. 

Her work has taken her down many winding roads, across many borders, and digital screens. She traveled the world to attend the prestigious art school, Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). Wang then received her MA in Print at the Royal College of Art (London). Still based in London, she has a studio provided by ASC Studios and is a freelance product photographer. She has explored digital manipulation in PhotoShop and print-making, but always returns to photography. Some of Wang’s favourite memories are traveling across the United States in sleeper trains, the secret Tresco Abbey Gardens in England, and seeing the Caribbean Islands.

We are pleased to present this in-depth conversation with Wang.

How would you describe your work to a lay person?

I would say, as a photographer, that I like taking pictures on a moving vehicles, trains, or buses through windows as landscapes fleet by. I also like taking pictures at 1-3am on the street just by myself and set long exposures to document the city-light interfering with the night. With my digital camera, which is my tool all the time, my work is like pressing the stop button in the daytime and pressing the start button at night. The reason I’m so obsessed with this work is because as I’m getting older, I strongly feel that everything in life happens just once and is felt once; things are very easily forgotten. So for me, there’s nothing wrong with taking more pictures: to give a chance to interesting things to be seen clearly and therefore to exist. It gives me pleasure when I see things in the picture that I didn’t catch with my eyes. Yeah, that’s what I would say to a layperson.

Oh, wow. I have one question as an offshoot: what intrigues you most about photographing the night over the day?

Maybe the night makes me feel closer to a city or town. The moon is a traveler’s friend. Imagine walking along the light posts, the road ahead is always illuminated…how could that not be appreciated? In comparison to capturing fleeting moments in daytime, taking photographs of the night helps me slow down. Night softens the foreign feelings, showing the same place in a different color. I think about the unconscious landscape during the daytime, while I’m traveling bus, or when everyone is sleeping. I could feel the importance of capturing what just passed by, which keeps disappearing from my world like the wind, so the camera really help me see the past.

And you are mainly based in London, right?

Yeah, so the city never sleeps.

I’m kind of curious if your choice of media has changed over time, and/or, what began your interest in photography in particular?

I think when I was a teenager, I love manga and magazines. I feel it’s just such a pleasant and engaging way to read stories through images. While in middle school and high school, I also read classical Chinese poetry. I remember my teacher always said that an important method in classical Chinese poetry is to express feelings through landscapes. I think this method ends up good for my photography and seems to never get old.

But after I finished my photo program in RISD (Rhode Island School of Design), I am trying to give myself a break from photography, so I moved to London to do my graduate program in printmaking, because I thought it was a good opportunity to think beyond the image about the materials. Then tried laser cutting, UV print-printing on acrylics, screen printing, and many other things to contrast or deconstruct an image. Also during this time, I started trying to play with not just my photographs, but also with images from a textbook or a museum databases. I did a project where I intentionally printed images from other countries’ museums of the Chinese Antique. Then they become replicas, become my objects, and then I rephotograph them in a specific setup to explore the idea of time-travel through the transference of surface. I think I always get back to photography and maybe sometimes the reason I experiment with different media is because of a defect of the image, and I try to fix it, cover it, or add more images to support each other, then it leads to maybe a book, which has to be materialized.

Do you play a lot with overlaying textures in your photographs?

I’m also very interested in computer generated art, so I learned some basics of web-coding. In one project, I took a lot of pictures of gardens because that’s what impressed me about the UK. I used Photoshop to cut my favorite plants out from the photo so they become single species. Then I coded a grid so the computer can randomly insert those tiny flowers into different grids, which I then layered the four grids together. The first layer is the tiniest grid, and then the second one double sized and so on, so you have smallest plant at the bottom the meddle sized in the middle and the big trees on top, like making a real garden plan. The computer gives random results and I choose my favorite plan. I made it into a screen print by stamping the little flowers onto the paper one by one, which is something I’ve never done before without going to graduate school. I feel each different print method, like intaglio print, screen print, they all change the quality of the image compared to digital prints, so it’s like a fine tuning or a filter if you want to push your aesthetics.

That’s so cool. You have talked a little bit about your journey as an artist, but more specifically, when and where did you start your creative journey?

Yeah, I think I always liked the idea of traveling. I think my journey started seven years ago, from when I first started my photography program at RISD. Ever since then, this traveling, this art voyage away from home, just never stops. It’s like I’m driving my paper boat across the surface of a world map towards an unsure destination. It’s this experience of always drifting and never settling down which is sometimes uneasy, but also becomes the context and background of my art making. I feel like that and that is how I view the world: as a traveler, I think sometimes it’s a very vulnerable point of view, because it’s very hard to dig deeper as a traveler, but I also really cherish this fresh feelings of being a traveler entering a new place or a place you heard about or you read from the book. This nonstop makes a gesture of someone’s seeking, hunting.

That’s really beautiful. What are some of your upcoming projects? What have you been working on?

For me, I’m trying to still stick to this one project which threads my traveling photographs. It will have different chapters and different experiments in different stages. I actually just got back from a trip from Spain, and before that, Peru and Bolivia. I think it’s time to make an edit, I’d love to make a book from them, make some prints, and put them on a wall.

Where might we interact/see your upcoming project? I would love to follow up.

Recently, I spent a lot of time with Instagram. I use it as a tool to reflect on my work. I like the idea “posting” which indicates a time sequence and triggers the action of editing and responding in real time. It’s such a natural way about “interacting” with audience. I like putting images into the grid to see how they crash or harmonize with each other and how they create a rhythm or pattern that represents my life’s beat.

I’ll definitely keep a lookout for that then. How does your upcoming body of work fit in with the larger framework of your career?

Well, no one could guarantee a framework of career. I just wish this work could be seen more by people, and maybe one day I can get feedback from the people living in those countries I’ve traveled to and see how these photographs feel to them. Do they feel fresh at all? I would also like to travel more to fulfill my bucket list. The more I travel, the more pictures I took, and the more I identify myself, the more I understand the meaning of travel. It is interesting for me to zoom in the world through a person’s eyes, and vice versa, to zoom out to see one person navigating herself in a big world. That’s all I do.

How do you see—maybe like this project—future projects like help you evolve in your practice and your career?

I used to focus on a single image as a finished piece. Now, I pay more attention to how different the photos I take talk to each other. So the work I have now makes me think about the next image, like thinking about the next post on the instagram. I always take self-portraits along the way. I’m a solitary traveler in the past, which drives me to make some work/memory about me on the way. When I put my self-portrait and other documentation together, it feels like introducing a personal timeline to those landscapes. My existence in the photo is like a magnet on the fridge, which tells a dated story that somehow relate to what is currently contained in the background or inside the fridge. I also change day-to-day with the background.

I’m really excited to see where this goes. What are seven things you must have while traveling abroad and working?

There is a list that’s very stable because it’s all digital: laptop camera, the charging kit, hard drive, tripod, and very importantly shutter release for making self-portraits.

And do you print your photographs or keep them digital?

I would love to utilize more of the internet to showcase my work. I think: “I’m taking digital photographs, it’s the digital world where they belong to in the first place.” I also feel the photographs I take give me a dwelling space on the internet. That space is more fictional with more possibility. I try to give it some imagination by walking back and forth, juxtaposing my pictures from different times and see how they communicate with each other. I keep them digital, but when I really like to think clearly about the picture I would like to print them.

Where have you had your work featured? Have you presented at gallery spaces?

The last time I put my photographs in a gallery was two or three years ago. Recently, I
got a free studio so I have the opportunity to put things on my wall, which I think will
happen very soon.