Yip is a young artist living in Hong Kong. She is inspired
by animals and calls herself “The White Deer”1 as this is her
favourite animal and colour. She says “With animals, everything is just one
way. They’re born, they grow, they prey and they breed, which is everything so
naturally done. That’s why I like tying them to my drawings, kind of a reminder
or a statement.”1 Her name “The White Deer” links to the drawings
she does, like her drawings she is a human with an animal linked to her. To
link this to me I could do drawings of my friends and draw the animal they
relate to on top in Yip’s style.
Yip’s
work does not have individual names but instead she names the by series; this
series is called Wildlife. In this series, Yip draws a human face in graphite and
then draws an animal face over the top in red coloured pencil. She draws the animal and human in the same sort of
position which makes them both look similar. This made me think about looking
at spirit animals as the humans look like they could be transforming into the. In the drawing to the right, both the wolf and
the girl are looking to the left and slightly up which makes the girl look as
if she is howling with the wolf. The wolf is in red which makes it stand out
more compared to the grey drawing. This makes me think that the animal is the
more important part of the composition. Yip also seems to think this; “they
make up for the stupid things that humans do. I know I’m being too forward but
humans always find a way to bring stupidity to another level.”1. For
this series, Yip quotes Jim fowler “The quicker we humans learn that saving
open space and wildlife is critical to our welfare and quality of life, maybe
we'll start thinking of doing something about it.”2 Which suggests
that this series is all about how we need to think about working with animals
and saving them instead of working against animals and nature and destroying
everything.
Yip creates many pieces based on animals
and humans together, she has another series called Peculiar in which she uses
animal masks to hide the humans’ identity. This reminds me of my other artist’s
work; Charlotte Caron. They both look at the theme of duality by bringing the
animal and human world together, however, she hides the people’s identity in a
different way to Caron. Yip’s work doesn’t feel as though the human is
transforming into the animal but more that people are wearing a mask as opposed
to Caron merging the human and animal together. She quotes Robert Bloch- “Horror
is the removal of masks.”2 Which suggests that she feels that we are
all wearing masks, perhaps she uses animals because of their innocence or maybe
the animals show our true, primitive side.
In
this piece to the left she only uses pen,
unlike the series Wildlife where she uses some colour. This makes the mask and
the human feel more realistic, whereas in wildlife the animal is drawn on top
in red in an unrealistic way. There is an emphasis on the animal here as we can
see the animal’s face and not the human’s so like in wildlife it feels as
though the animal is more empowered than the human.
This piece to the right is part of a
series called ‘Circle of the sun’. Here Yip has obviously been influenced by
Japanese culture. In each piece, she has painted a red circle and leaves the
background white just like the Japanese flag. She has also has drawn the person
in a Kimono and has drawn the hair in a Japanese style. I could mimic this in
my own work but instead use Native American culture to fit in with my idea of
looking at spirit animals.
Like
in most of her drawings she has used mainly graphite. For the red paint, she
has used gouache which is something I’ve never used before so it might be
something I experiment with later on. Like in her series ‘Peculiar’ Yip has
used animal masks to hide the identity of the person she has drawn, this time
it doesn’t feel as though the animal is more important than the human because
of the detail put into both the animal mask and the person’s hair. It instead
feels like the person is hiding behind the mask or that the mask represents the
person’s personality due to the being drawn in the same style.
A running theme in all of her work seems to be being quite
simplistic. She rarely does backgrounds and when she does they are very
simplistic like her ‘Circle of the Sun’ series. She also uses colour in a
minimalistic way with red being a colour she uses in many of her series. Red is
a very bold colour so she may use it to make things stand out against her black
and white drawings.
References:
this is such a good analysis! mind if i take some inspiration for my analysis?
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