Yaya Wang

BIOGRAPHIE

Yaya (Xi-lin) is a non-binary & genderfluid film director, animator and multidisciplinary artist, originally from France and of Chinese descendant, and currently based in London. Yaya loves to work with water-based paints, clay, liquids and found objects that hold a special memory quality to them. Yaya's work meld those mediums with the 2D animation that is often improvisation-based, and the result of straight-ahead animating, inspired by Yaya's practice of contemporary dance and movement work. Text works and poetry, as well a translating between French, Mandarin and English, is also a big part of their practice when making films. Director Statement Translating between languages taps in for Yaya as a way to expand how notions of growth, love, care and recovering, can all be relearned to be spoken within our mind and our communities, with telling stories — not just in Mandarin, French or English, but also between the mediums. The stop-motions parts of the films are a mix-match of clay animation and real-life pebbles, seashells and sea glass found across various shores, carrying with them great memory qualities — things that wash ashore and that were part of a story long told, and that are now immobile witnesses of the past, but in fragments. Even some of the foley, made in collaboration with Mer sounds – Yuki Nakayama – are recorded through real seashells. Into the next tide is a fragment reconstitution of thoughts and experiences of grief, through the loss of loved ones, split in friendships & relationships, to lost part of one-self through the gender identity exploration and figuring out. Yaya dedicate this film to the queer, East/South-East Asian communities that have welcomed them in a new, caring home. This film is an offering, that gathers together past experiences and a deep desire to be present, and invites them to coexist in a words where there's not always need for binary opposition. The film is also a set-free, and an ode to enjoying the process of making, while keeping it playful, open and improvisational, as an act of honoring the love and commitment we have for drawing and telling stories, and be brave enough to let the unfurling, fertile surprise that this freedom brings, in weaving into the space of unknown.

FILMOGRAPHIE