End of Spring by Ying Ji

My creative drive mainly comes from my past memories and my present emotions. In both cases, death has been an important subject. To me, death often comes together with hope. The end of something often means the birth of something new. The same is true with photography. When I prepare for a photo shoot, I merge ideas from poems and emotions into the installations and shooting set arrangements. When I press the shutter to capture the photo, there is a sense of ending or death of these arrangements. At the same time, a new meaning or life is born within the photo. To me, this is the eternal enigma of photography that attracts me forever.

In terms of my creative process and techniques, I focus on two things: simplicity and merge. Simplicity is the center focus of photography, where the artist needs condense all her emotions, creative ideas, and different artistic elements into a two dimensional, in my case, mostly black and white image. This simplicity is a great constraint but at the same time offers fantastic amount of freedom for creativity. In terms of merge, I often merge elements of music, poems, paining, and installation into my creative process. I may start with an idea that I discover in poem or music. I then express the idea by painting, making installations, and eventually capturing the image using tools and instruments afforded by photography. In summary, it is a process starts from simplicity then evolves into complexity, eventually returns to simplicity.