ANGEL QIN
ABOUT ANGEL QIN
Angel Jiaqi Qin is a London-based multimedia artist. She excels in redefining mundane elements in life by harnessing the pre-existing, and it appears that media represents the fertile soil for her deconstruction and reorganization. However, her works embody that the artistic language of the artists is full of rejections of definitions and perfectionism, and that she rebels against consumption alienation and colonization in daily life. Through intimately intertwining different materials, Angel transforms defined and disciplined objects into new roles in a new realm and even endow them with their own languages, which dismantles old orders and fosters new ones. Nonetheless, are these really orders? That may resemble the upside-down world in Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. In Angel’s narratives, it seems that we walk into Jorge Luis Borges’ The Garden of Forking Paths, since there is no linearity and each branch derives a new reality (she may not call it reality herself because absolutes are absent in her world).
Lace and Fetish
By Angel Qin
White
Euphoria
In her independently designed and implemented “white euphoria” series, Angel designed a range of sensual underwear tailored specifically for white household appliances, such as washing machines, microwaves, refrigerators and air conditioners, and made headwear through using different mineral materials. She invited models of different races, skin colors, and genders to showcase these unique headwear and sensual underwear. In painting, Rothko uniquely treated color edges through adeptly eliminating the conceptual limitations that may arise during using the elements. Similarly, Angel’s works blur boundaries. In the creation of headwear, she utilized some special materials that mimic the texture of stones and minerals, and the headwear were endowed with different colors and textures according to the diverse skin tones of the models. This enables stones to be “textures” which witness gradual elimination of boundaries with human skin, fostering a blend between human body and inorganic substances like stones.
In this series, Angel endowed household appliances with the potential to be sexy. In the process of the performance, the stark outlines of machines outlined by fabrics intertwined with the curvy contours of the human body, which blurred the boundaries between machines and humanity. As Angel herself puts it, “Household appliances are similar to the autonomic nervous system in the living space of our homes. They operate independently of consciousness, and regulate the basic physiological activities of our internal organs, including breathing and heartbeat, sustaining the most fundamental instincts of lives. Different from furniture including tables and chairs, which have direct sensory intimacy with the human body, white household appliances, in Angel’s perspective, can evoke a sense of sexual frigidity. Combined with their inherent whiteness, this tends to diminish the existence of white household appliances, reducing them solely to machines for use and function.
In Angel’s other works, a profound “sense of texture” pervades, as she endeavors to evoke viewers’ sensory experiences and make them feel the quality and depth of images through emphasizing texture. She believes that texture adds a layer of realism and tangibility, enhancing the immersive nature of her images. Angel’s works never exist in isolation from their environments; instead, she continously ponders how to foster interactions between development, tradition and reality. It is possible that intervening in the environment is the role Angel assumes in her creations. Angel thinks that the rules and regulations of the conventional world are her building materials. She shatters these building materials and create a new language through different media, breaking down established orders and reconstructing her own new order, which embraces all existences and allows everything to happen.
Along the tide of industrial revolution, functional electrical appliances were mass-produced, and women’s status and the production of women-oriented products underwent significant advancements.
Lace, once exclusive to aristocrats, and women’s underwear, initially only having functionality, were changed in terms of production and functionality with industrial development. Notably, after entering the 20th century, lace and women’s underwear gradually evolved from mere symbols of function and status to signs of women’s self-expression and sensuality. The emergence of household appliances and industrialized production in the mid-20th century were pivotal factors in gradually emancipating women from traditional familial roles. The elements converged by industrial revolution, coupled with the mineral elements in headwear, thought by Angel as representatives of non-human time span unit, gradually generated a unique fabric of time” through Angel’s elimination and organization of their boundaries, resembling the concept employed in Angel’s ongoing video editing prototype project.
