The digital artist, permanently installed in the zeitgeist, is exhibiting her work in a museum for the first time ever. John Yuyi (I.G. @johnyuyi) enters the artistic paradise of the Fotomuseum in Switzerland to explore, together with more than 40 other artists, the relation between play and photography.
The collective exhibition “How to win at Photography“, comprising a series of contemporary and historical works from the 20th century, in the form of multimedia art and vernacular images, questions the nature and function of the image in the present. Among other things, it examines the structures of video games and questions notions of identity, gender, and class.
What can playful forms of photography achieve on a political and social level? Who or what performs the act of viewing and photographing: people, machines, or a combination of both? Who plays and who wins? These are some of the questions raised by the art show, something that John Yuyi has been trying to decipher over the past few years.
Through a virtual work that draws on ideas such as ego as avant-garde culture, or studies the intersection between the body and images, or between the physical and the virtual, the Taiwanese creative enters into conceptual synchrony with the artistic constellation.
In this universe of synergies, John Yuyi installs some of her works inspired by the addiction or the dilemma of social networks, as well as how identity is distorted by the blue light. That’s precisely one of the phenomena analyzed in the photo exhibition: how being subordinated to metrics or quantifiable values such as “likes” or “followers” actively promotes the gamification of visual culture.
“How to win a Photography” will be on display at Fotomuseum Winterthur in Switzerland until 10 October. Visit it and live the virtual experience.
By Laura Pérez
