LONDON.- Artist Zorg (Yifan Jing), based in London as a visual artist, was graduated with a degree of illustration at Goldsmiths, University of London in 2017. Zorg's way of working is fieldwork-inspired: his illustrations are accompanied by spatial constructions, investigating themes of migration and transcultural stories. His two latest major projects, The Migration Project (2023) and Clover (2024) , represent an important turning point in his artistic journey - from macro geopolitical issues towards a micro-cultural and identity exploration in his daily life.
The Migration Project (2023) is an example of Zorg's early works on geopolitical issues. This project originated from a collaborative fieldwork study he did with artist Yang in 2022 to trace the southward migration route of Asian elephants in Yunnan. This immersive on-site study inspired Zorg to create a distinct visual methodology that moves between documentary and embodied, reflective experiences. His pencil sketches do not just replicate reality; rather, they create a delayed, echoing response to transient moments of animal movement—elephants crossing fields, entering water, boarding cargo ships—which are portrayed as impressions rather than events. This capturing of "impressions" depicts Zorg's future interests on micro-details. The Migration Project interweaves these hand-drawn pieces with digital collage materials drawn from state archives and technocratic control systems: thermal satellite imagery, migration maps, and historical photographs documenting the relocation and trade of elephants. Together, they form afragmented “visual archive,” where tensions between nature and civilization, visibility and erasure, are rendered palpable.
In this project, Zorg is not to romanticise the elephant as an ecological sublime symbol; but he puts elephant as a political agent, and this re-examines the triangular relationship between spatial rationality of power, documentation and agency. From microscopic daily life, Zorg's Clover (2024) project is an artistic exploratory path that has moved from reflecting on the large scale of migration under geopolitical power, to a profound questioning on existence and identity in an extensive sense - who we are and how we identify ourselves and our communities when we are in a constant state of cultural exchange.
Zorg has been engaged in long-term fieldwork in a multi-ethnic community in East London. He explores how cultural totems, spiritual narratives and everyday decorative objects cross-breed and regenerate in such coexisting space. In Clover, Zorg continues with his fieldwork rooted method; but the fieldwork subject is human interaction. Zorg listens carefully to the stories and myths of residents from Asian, Arab, African and European cultural backgrounds.
Inspired by a symbolic window in the community, Zorg reconstructs these cross-cultural and spiritual narratives in a new visual form.The central part of the work, The Four-Leaf Window, is a wooden triptych. But it's a three-layered picture. The outer layer is physically the layered 'shells' of what the community identifies themselves in terms of decorative language. The middle layer is the places where the artist himself stands and the 'gaze of the other’. The inner layer expresses the tension between the desire of self-expression and being watched. This in-depth study on layered identity is a micro-level continuation of the discussion on "visibility and erasure" that Zorg has started in The Migration Project.
More interestingly, Zorg found a unique symbolic system that has formed in the community through years of cultural exchange. It is an archival mixture of Buddhist totems, Egyptian hieroglyphs, Islamic geometric patterns and Christian icons. Live performance was shown in Zorg’s solo exhibition in Beijing. Patterns from The Four-Leaf Window are extracted as flags and gradually carried by performers in the exhibition gallery space. This, as Zorg calls it, is a "second migration" of static images off the canvas, making them living, breathing symbols of cultural identity. Not only does this reinforce the central concept of "migration" from The Migration Project, but it also shifts the understanding of this concept from grand, geographical migration, to the migration and recreation of cultural symbols within a community. Through Clover, Zorg’s practice moves not only from observing externally imposed migration and accompanying existential dilemmas, but also to understanding the internal process by which we as humans create and observe culture within our everyday lives. This shows a continued evolution of Zorg’s artistic attention from macro to micro, and a sustained interest in the complex nature of our cultural identities.
In the end, Zorg's artistic practice consistently deepens his fieldwork-based methodology. He progresses from observing the elephant as a “political agent" to intricately portraying "cultural agents" within human communities, skillfully integrating the embodied experience of sketching with the archival and macro aspects of digital collage to construct a unique visual language. This shift from externally imposed geographical displacement to internally generated cultural fluidity not only broadens Zorg's understanding of “migration" and "identity" but also demonstrates how he precisely redirects his artistic focus from grand geopolitical issues to a profound exploration of the complexities of culture and identity in microscopic daily life. Ultimately, Zorg's work transcends mere narration or representation; it becomes a dynamic process of visual genetic reconstruction, inviting viewers to jointly explore how we define and experience our cultural identities in an ever-changing world.
