YANG JINGTIAN: MIRRORS, MATERIALS, AND THE MAKING OF THE SELF

Lithography, steel and glass: in Yang Jingtian’s world, nothing is merely a material to carry form. Other than appearance, each material holds memory, tension, and the paradoxes of being seen. His works are built not for permanence but for proximity. This is an unresolved space among bodies, gazes, and selves. “Between the idea and the reality, between the motion and the act, falls the shadow (Eliot 1925)."¹ In Yang’s art practice, shadow is not a void but a tension, where intimacy resists transparency, and the self becomes visible only through distortion.

Born in China and currently based in London, Yang Jingtian is a rising interdisciplinary artist whose practice spans sculpture, printmaking, video, and installation. With a background in animation and printmaking, Yang works across media to explore the shifting boundaries between the self and society, intimacy and distance, projection and presence. Drawing on psychoanalysis, particularly Lacan's mirror stage, Yang visualises the self as always seen through the gaze of another, reflected, mediated, and never entirely one’s own.

Lithography: Entangled Bodies of Intimacy and Dissolution

Lithography forms the bedrock of Yang’s image-making. In the series of large lithographs, Murmurs of a Melting Embrace (2025), shadowy human figures appear to fuse, dissolve, or recoil from one another, reflecting how intimacy can simultaneously both connect and erode individual identity. In Murmurs of a Melting Embrace 01 (2025), two figures lean into each other with almost desperate proximity, yet are never fully unified. They seem formed not by contour but by erosion. Blurred edges, absences, and bleeding tonalities dominate the surface.

Murmurs of a Melting Embrace 01, 2025, Lithography on Paper, 53 x 74cm

In Murmurs of a Melting Embrace 02 (2025), asymmetry and retreat are rendered in posture, as one figure leans in while the other withdraws. What appears to be a moment of intimacy becomes a choreography of tension between softness and strength, desire and dissolution. The work resists fixed interpretation, instead capturing the moment when emotional proximity gives way to psychic disintegration.

Murmurs of a Melting Embrace 02, 2025, Lithography on Paper, 71 x 59cm

Mirror, Gaze, and the Imaginary Self

Yang’s sculptural installation Staring at Me, Like I Don’t Even Exist (2025), selected for SWANFALL ART Annual Exhibition, Fables, extends the concern with interpersonal tension into the realm of surveillance and social feedback. It consists of a set of bent metal plates printed with detached eyes, arranged in a mirrored construction that reflects both the viewer and the printed eyes. Printed through a process called UV printing and guided by eye-tracking data, the work resuscitates a spatial map of looking and being looked at, suggesting that our identities are continually shaped by how we imagine we are seen.

Staring at Me, Like I Don’t Even Exist, 2025

 Installation with Mirrors, Monoprint on Metal, Variable Size

The conceptual framework draws on Jacques Lacan’s "mirror stage," a theory first developed to describe how infants construct an image of the self when gazing at their mirror image. This theory later expanded into a more complex framework of the imaginary and symbolic orders, suggesting that the self is continually formed in relation to the gaze of the Other. Yang’s installation enacts this precisely. The mirrors cue viewers to an encounter with their own image, framed by images of wide eyes that look out and in at them. The viewer is effectively subsumed into the work — ensnared in a gaze loop, held between looking and being looked at.

The companion video work The Shape of Me Is Unknown to My Eyes (2024) functions as the digital module of Staring at Me, Like I Don’t Even Exist (2025). It captures and visualises viewers’ eye movements, drawing attention to those unthinking actions that inform our process of self-creation in the company of others. Where the installation feels sculptural and participatory, the video offers a more forensic mode of intimacy by taking stock of the invisible mechanics by which attention is distributed and identity is translated into data.

Screenshot of Staring at Me, Like I Don’t Even Exist - The Shape of Me is Unknown to My Eyes

2024, Video, Variable Size

Screenshot of Staring at Me, Like I Don’t Even Exist - The Shape of Me is Unknown to My Eyes

2024, Video, Variable Size

Skin, Metal, and the Desire to Withhold

If Yang’s conceptual framework is Lacanian, his aesthetic strategies are materialist. In sculptural installations like Bloom Touch, Never Reach (2025),  also shown in the SWAFALL ART Annual Exhibition, Fables, the artist juxtaposes rigid steel structures with fragile silicone membranes. A fragile, skin-like membrane is taut inside a cold frame, faintly mottled with the tracings of lace. Metal flowers bow toward it but never meet, forever bewailing their unsatisfied desire.

Bloom Touch, Never Reach, 2025,

Installation with Metal Sculpture and Monoprint on Silicone, 193 x 42 x 102cm

The contrast between materials is more than formal. It speaks to the instability of emotional connection and brings out how structures of discipline and control often surround tenderness. The silicone is at once a barrier and a wound, a close surface made industrial. In the hands of Yang, material is metaphor: metal is the social system, silicone the soft body trying to find its place in that order.

Details of Bloom Touch, Never Reach, 2025,

Installation with Metal Sculpture and Monoprint on Silicone, 193 x 42 x 102cm

Details of Bloom Touch, Never Reach, 2025,

Installation with Metal Sculpture and Monoprint on Silicone, 193 x 42 x 102cm

Between the Gaze and the Flesh

Yang Jingtian’s work resides in the space between surface and interior, gesture and restraint, recognition and alienation. Across multiple media, he stages encounters where the self is never given, only performed, through the materials that carry it, and the eyes that look back.

His installations and prints suggest that subjectivity is not static, but assembled from projections, pressures, and fragments. In this, Yang probes the politics of vision and the architectures of selfhood. But what sets his voice apart is not only his conceptual prowess, but the intimacy of his visual language, where theory is not a shield but a tool to feel with.  As viewers, we are not asked to decode but to reflect on how much of what we see is ourselves and how much is the Other, looking back.

Bibliography

¹ Eliot, T. S. 1925. “The Hollow Men.” Poets.org. Academy of American Poets. Accessed October 30, 2025. https://poets.org/poem/hollow-men

Images: © Yang Jingtian, Courtesy of the Artist

Editor: Biyao (Katie) Yu