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Drifting Between the Estranged and the Mundane: Yilin Jin’s Dialogue with the City and Memory

Sep. 28, 2024

English / Chinese

@ahjinsaysyes

Q: QINXI YU
A: YILIN JIN

TRANSLATED BY YI-CHANG YANG

Yilin Jin is a photographer and interdisciplinary artist currently pursuing an undergraduate degree in Photography and Printmaking at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His work is deeply influenced by his experiences living in multiple cities, exploring the intersection of personal history, geography, and urban life. Through photobooks, writing, and performance, he creates a dialogue between his internal and external world.

Yilin’s recent projects cover a wide range of topics, including the historical geography of his hometown, the migration of certain plants, and comfort foods related to recovery after illness. These projects intertwined his past landscapes with contemporary life, drawing from personal experience while reflecting collective memory. His artwork often responds to his nomadic lifestyle, capturing the emotional resonance of transitioning between different homes, cities, and cultures.

Yilin’s creative process is marked by self-reflection. He typically begins with a small discovery or inspiration, which he then nurtures in solitude, allowing it to develop into a narrative or emotional journey. Whether he is walking the streets with his camera or meticulously planning the details of a project, his creative approach is instinctive and intuitive. Over time, he refines his work through reflection, organizing images and stories into cohesive books or series. For Yilin, the most important part of his creative practice is the time spent alone, letting his thoughts take shape and guide his artistic development.

Drawing from the landscapes of China and the urban rhythms of Chicago, Yilin’s work is a poetic exploration of place, memory, and identity. His art resonates with those who navigate between different worlds, inviting people to find comfort in the subtle details of everyday life.

Q: How do you balance writing and photography in your creative process? When you start with a story or a feeling, how do they manifest in your work?

A: I keep a diary-like form of writing, and this daily writing sometimes becomes the source of a particular piece of work (more importantly, it keeps me mindful of “living each day well”). When I find an idea interesting and decide to start working on it, I also try to write an essay to gather all the scattered thoughts and create a good starting point, while also hoping to discover something new. Once I pick up the camera and start taking photos, writing usually gets put aside. Taking photos tends to exhaust all my energy, and I can hardly bring myself to type or pick up a pen. After I feel that a certain stage is completely finished (for example, once a book is formed), I write some summarizing text to reflect on the process. The long article on my website about Bump is an example of this type of writing. This process is inspiring for me because some unintentional memories resurface during writing, and those memories become particularly significant at that moment. Therefore, I feel that writing makes my photography more enriched and fuller. Writing, for me, is a daily emotional outlet, while photography doesn’t hold a particularly important place in my life; it’s a relatively pure creative medium. I haven’t carried a camera around for casual shooting in a long time.

Hmm… How should I put it… I think what reflects my starting point in my work is the visual appearance of my pieces. My creative process is very centered on myself and also quite linear. The style of the work and the images in it often follow the original concept I imagined, such as the book’s binding and the format of the photos. For me, if there aren’t any significant encounters, I wouldn’t change these plans. But the core of the work itself is always changing, as I often come across new elements during the creative process that go beyond what I originally imagined. For instance, the origin of Bump was simply because I couldn’t sleep in the middle of the night and saw someone selling pear seedlings on Facebook Marketplace while browsing online, but the final result went far beyond what I envisioned during that late-night burst of excitement. My writing can reflect this developmental process. I hope this answers your second question.

Q: How do you view your relationship with the two cities in your works “Konstallation” and “Miles apart, tonight shares our hearts”?

A: I lived alone in Shanghai for almost three years to attend high school, moving houses three times in that period. I’ve only been living in Chicago for a year, sharing a student apartment with friends. Konstallation was completed during my last period in Shanghai, in late 2022, during a cold winter. The wind that winter was not only cold but also very humid; even wearing a down jacket, the cold would pierce through to my chest, making me shiver. It was also one of the toughest times for me, having graduated from high school while many of my friends in Shanghai had left for college elsewhere, only coming back during holidays. It felt like I was back to the two-month lockdown in Shanghai earlier that year, where I could only talk to objects in my quiet room… At that time, I was living in an old neighborhood near Hongqiao Road Station, and extreme loneliness drove me outside. In the middle of the night, when no one was around, I would rent a shared bike and ride to the Huangpu River several kilometers away. On my way, I would stop and sneak into old neighborhoods, home to many elderly people, to see how they lived (since the security guards would usually be asleep at this hour, I even took quite a few photos of sleeping guards). They reminded me of my grandparents, and they showed me the gentle side of Shanghai—a giant city that becomes quiet when everyone is asleep, with the lights spilling out from rooms and the clutter on the walls slowly narrating each person’s life. This was the starting point for the work. The vastness and fast pace of Shanghai once made me feel despair, but in the end, the city remains a place for people; Shanghai belongs to its residents. In Konstallation, I tried to reignite my motivation to live earnestly by observing urban life in Shanghai. I have a love-hate relationship with Shanghai; it has shaped (nurtured) who I am today and my creative work. Shanghai is the root of my art.

Reflecting on these experiences, I reorganized photos from Shanghai and Wenzhou and made a small photo collection:
https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/q7MfycO9OdZ_3FYobF-hog.

Chicago fills me with intense fear. It’s not because of the city’s notorious safety issues often mentioned by international students—it’s simply because this place is a world away from where I’ve lived before. Here, my mind is constantly tense, thinking about how to speak to people, how to handle the trivial matters of life, and how to protect my constantly chapped lips in the dry winter… I once prided myself on having independent living experience in a big city, but Chicago broke me. My energy was depleted, and I experienced emotional breakdowns multiple times. Living here feels like a battle; I’m grappling with insurmountable challenges. In these moments, my past life becomes incredibly alluring—the cheap, readily available takeout and the tasty, inexpensive street food are precious memories. Miles apart, tonight shares our hearts was created during the peak of my longing for the past—both temporally and geographically. My heart doesn’t belong to Chicago; it belongs somewhere on the other side of the world. I’m also trying to embrace life in Chicago—it’s the Midwest of the United States, with beautiful sunsets on good days, a diverse and well-run artistic community, and, strangely, it sits beside a lake that looks like the ocean. Recently, I’ve been riding my bike along the lakeshore, finding completely dark and quiet spots to sit by the lake and rest, which brings me great comfort. I’m still fighting with this strange place in my own way (of course, to this place, I suppose I’m an “alien” too).

Q: Are the influences of these cities on you similar, or is there a contrast between them?

A: I suppose they are similar. Shanghai and Chicago appeared at two different stages of my life, during high school and university, respectively, and I faced different major issues in each. Moreover, compared to my life history in Shanghai, I’ve only lived in Chicago for just over a year, so naturally, their influences differ in some ways. But overall, the difference is mainly in the emotional response I have towards these two cities. I feel their influence on me is similar: at the core of it all, my hometown of Wenzhou resides in my heart.

While living in Shanghai, I came to a conclusion related to psychogeography: looking out from a high-rise building in Shanghai, I would unconsciously feel dizzy and insecure. This is the alluvial plain of the Yangtze River Delta—endless in its expanse, yet without a single hill over 200 meters. Shanghai, along with its satellite cities, forms a concrete empire. In Wenzhou, however, the edges of the city are always lined with tall, dark silhouettes, and you can catch a glimpse of them from most places within the city. There is an old saying that seven-tenths of Wenzhou’s land is mountain, which is true—this image naturally forms part of my geographical imagination. Somewhere in my heart, these modest hills and mountains protect all my precious childhood memories.

Shanghai and Chicago are both unfamiliar cities to me, and they form a dialectical relationship with Wenzhou in my heart: the carefree city life in Wenzhou guides my current way of living, while the brand new experiences of living in these new cities alter my perception of Wenzhou (so much so that I feel different each time I return). Wenzhou is my focal point, and my experiences in new cities intertwine with Wenzhou, shaping my thoughts and character.

Q: The theme of wandering is present in all of your works. How do you perceive the significance of wandering in your creative process?

A: In my work The Stranger, I quoted a poem by Baudelaire called “The Stranger,” and I think this poem explains my mindset all along very well.

"Whom do you love the best, enigmatic man? Tell me. Your father, your mother, your sister or your brother?”

—I have neither father nor mother, nor sister, nor brother.

—Your friends?

—You help yourself to a word there whose sense leaves me clueless to this day.

—Your country then?

—I don't even know which latitude it resides in.

—Beauty?

—I would love her willingly, were she a goddess and immortal.

—Gold!

—I hate it as much as you hate God.

—Well! What do you love, extraordinary stranger?

—“I love the clouds, ... the clouds that pass, comme ci, comme ça…above and beyond… the marvelous ineffable clouds!"

Since childhood, I have experienced a constantly shifting life, frequently moving between my own home and my two grandmothers’ homes. However, most of the time, I lived with a rather stable community—my schoolmates. After the age of 16, the experience of living alone in different cities came upon me like a great flood of unfamiliarity, tearing me apart. When I was 17, I wrote in my diary that I felt like a rootless duckweed drifting on the water. During my days in Shanghai, I also experienced the emergency state brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic, struggling to find an anchor in daily life…

“Wandering” is also the theme of my current life, and this state of wandering forces me to constantly ask myself: What is real life? I hope to find a lasting spiritual home through this inquiry. This state is the source of all my creative impulses; without it, I would have no desire to create at all.