Yi To

Lives and works in London, UK

Artist statement

I’m exploring the pre-narrative state of life formation where the body cannot be located in a specifically gendered, racial, or geographical point. Seeing existence as an embryonic domain where it actively takes the shape of reproductive patterns that vascularise, root, and sublate within a collective network, how this matrix relates to transcendence and the sublime is a fascinating and equally enigmatic subject that my practice heavily draws upon. To dissect existence and human’s role in it is to piece together fragments found through the lens of a history of mark-making, where discolouring, erosion, oxidation, and fading speak volumes of how decay naturally follows formation and the back-to-back relationship between life and death. Pigment and material here serve as cohesive devices that reveal primordiality and the present as a single organism and reinvent contemporaneity.

Artwork