YAN JIN
Cremeschnitte
Installation
2025
This project explores the notion that language, an encrypted code system, often unwittingly serves as a means to distinguish one group of people from another. It examines the naming of cremeschnitte as a shibboleth for identification, representing at the same time inclusion and exclusion.
By deconstructing cremeschnitte and withholding its name, the installation reassembles its meanings - no longer a singular dessert, but a cultural structure layered with collective and personal history - inviting viewers to reflect on how shared traditions are continually remade through the personal, the political, and the material.
By deconstructing cremeschnitte and withholding its name, the installation reassembles its meanings - no longer a singular dessert, but a cultural structure layered with collective and personal history - inviting viewers to reflect on how shared traditions are continually remade through the personal, the political, and the material.
Cremeschnitte
Book
2025
CREMESCHNITTE is a book exploring the dialectical relationship between languages, cultures and geopolitics. Together with video CREMESCHNITTE, it is part of my continuing project CREMESCHNITTE.
Published by Interlocutor Press, New York
A5 5.5 x 8 inches
82 Pages
ISBN: 978-0-9973030-2-5
Limited editions and printed with high quality Shiro Echo recycled paper.
Published by Interlocutor Press, New York
A5 5.5 x 8 inches
82 Pages
ISBN: 978-0-9973030-2-5
Limited editions and printed with high quality Shiro Echo recycled paper.
little lies and counterweights is a set of counterweights produced with low-density foam, endowed to critique power and authority. Used to establish precise standards of measurement, counterweights belong to the worlds of trade, technics, and global politics. The counterweights here reference rules that are imposed and enforced by institutions and systems. With their distressed and eroded surfaces, her facsimiles mimic ruins, as if to comment on the erosion of hierarchies that once defined the society. The statement of the cylindrical forms lies in their inaccuracy, fakeness, and resistance to the precision and perfection for which the originals stand.
Three Shadows Photography Art Center
30 Dec 2023 - 4 Feb 2024
Xiamen, China
The exhibition refers to a state of failure in expression and in interpretation. The title reflects a contradiction between the urge to document the world around us and the frustration of not being able to understanding its entirety. One of the interesting facts is that the Chinese and English versions of the title has slightly different meanings which also talks about the untranslatability and the unreliability in photography.
The sequence of the photos represent a road trip which pays homage to James Joyce’s Ulysses. The modernist novel parallels Homer’s epic poem the Odyssey. In stead of a journey of ten years, his protagonist spent a random day in one city wandering and found himself in loneliness and anxiety. In this case, the exhibition is a parodic representation of our relationships with the modern society and photography as well.
30 Dec 2023 - 4 Feb 2024
Xiamen, China
The exhibition refers to a state of failure in expression and in interpretation. The title reflects a contradiction between the urge to document the world around us and the frustration of not being able to understanding its entirety. One of the interesting facts is that the Chinese and English versions of the title has slightly different meanings which also talks about the untranslatability and the unreliability in photography.
The sequence of the photos represent a road trip which pays homage to James Joyce’s Ulysses. The modernist novel parallels Homer’s epic poem the Odyssey. In stead of a journey of ten years, his protagonist spent a random day in one city wandering and found himself in loneliness and anxiety. In this case, the exhibition is a parodic representation of our relationships with the modern society and photography as well.