Perceived Realities - Sunflower Field under the Blue Sky by Phoelix (Yiwen)

2021, 2023

Edition of 8, 3AP.

Video still, Archival pigment print
22”x13.53”

BIO: Phoelix (Yiwen) (b. China) is a multidisciplinary artist based in New York City. Her media spans photography, videos, audiovisual installations, paintings, sculptures, and immersive soundscapes, among others. Her artwork deals with pressing social issues, emphasizing the intricate interplay between perception and reality, as well as the significance of mental health, including misconceptions and the stigma surrounding mental health issues. She also explores the social construct of what is accepted as normal and abnormal. Phoelix's art emphasizes the real-life consequences of these issues on our perceptions, psychological states, and behaviors, including assumptions, conflicts, prejudice, division, hatred, apathy, and loss of life.

Through research-based practices, Phoelix creates psychological worlds and merges captured realities with perceptions. Audiovisual metaphors appear frequently, sometimes mixed with related interviews and music. Parallels are drawn between humans’ pursuit of hope and heliotropism: certain flowers’ chase of the moving sun. Fake flowers symbolize the masks of struggling individuals pretending to be doing great, while coats of monochromatic paint represent conformity or masking. Symbols of order, like paper clips, transform into chaotic forms. The new emerges from the brokenness or decay. Different perceptions of the same reality exist in the same work, resulting in conflicts. In Perceived Realities - Sunflower Field under the Blue Sky, the distorted sunflower field appears to exist in conflicting states: partially three-dimensional, resembling a moving digital sculpture, and partially on a two-dimensional plane. Together with reflective materials, translucent layers, materials used as filters, and sometimes projections, Phoelix’s work explores how perception and cognitive distortions differ from reality.

Phoelix (Yiwen) earned an MFA from the School of Visual Arts, New York (2022). She has shown her work internationally, including exhibitions at AHL Foundation, New York (2023); :iidrr Gallery, New York (2024, 2023, 2023); SVA Galleries, New York (2022, 2021); ZAZ10TS, New York (2021); Langyuan Station, Beijing (2021); and SCAD, Georgia (2015), among others.