by Kóan Jeff Baysa
curatorial fellow at the Whitney Museum of American Art
founding member of MOCA China
More often than not, brokering the right marriage between the arts and the sciences nowadays is a lopsided dance: the science is either too complex or a cipher to the art or the art is merely illustrative, or worse, decorative of the science.
Thus it is reassuring to find a talented artist, like Jiayi Young, who is also a bona fide scientist and to observe the thought processes that truly integrate these seemingly disparate fields. In the Renaissance, such conflated careers were customary, the exemplary case being Leonardo Da Vinci. Young has an MS in atomic physics, an MFA in media arts, and was a three-time all-American athlete in long jump competition. Her work in the late 90s that used frame-by-frame video analysis of Carl Lewis and Jackie Joyner-Kersee's movements in air, using the projectile motion of a complex body in physics, brought all of these talents and interests together.
Young has a foundation in Chinese painting, having studied with a master since six years of age, crossing over to abstract painting in 1989; circa 2002-2003 she first began to explore the line in the context of mathematics and physics. It seems a logical trajectory to have started with the line that comprised a pictograph that was refined into calligraphy, and is now elegantly revisited as line drawings reduced to mathematical formulae. Through these art investigations, Jiayi Young, the artist/physicist, and her spouse and collaborator Shin-Wen Young, the high-energy physicist/artist, reveal the roles that physical laws play in shaping the organic world. They remark jointly, "We are interested in the possibility of quantitatively describing systems that exhibit qualitative characteristics. It is intriguing to us to be able to find elegant underlining solution to complex appearances."
They have used the drawings of their two-year old daughter, Sophie, as a starting point to demonstrate this. Eventually, they hope to be able to take any random line, such as a human signature, and find its corresponding iteration equation and initial value for the signature. Chaos theory, also known as sensitive dependence on initial conditions, is about finding the underlying order in apparently random data. The Youngs' current research
focuses on the connection between the principle of feedback in chaos theory, doodling as a random process of mark making, and its place in contemporary culture. Their research theorizes that by utilizing mathematical fitting algorithms derived from the principle of feedback, one can find a simple equation that describes a random line. By using its property of self-similarity from fractal dimensions, one can predict where the mark may next extend itself. Random behavior can be approximated, as minor changes of the input values cause dramatic fluctuation of the output results, known as the "butterfly effect." In this feedback system, the current state depends on the previous state. Observations show that when one plots these lines over time, each collects itself at a certain origin, but they all have their own origin, known mathematically as an "attractor."
On another scale, Young tracks and analyzes human behavioral patterns with GPS (global positioning system) technology, creating art that tracks movements like a geodetic drawing device, inscribing abstract patterns, writings, or figurative images on the surface of the earth from a satellite perspective. Young explores the concept of tracking a point that becomes a line: "Lines, serving as an element of art, have a connection with how the world manifests itself on a fundamental level." Her GPS doodling project records the longitude, latitude, and altitude of an individual's quotidian activities, plotted out and fitted using iteration equations, mathematical operations that successively feed back the result of an equation back into the equation itself, i.e. recurrently using output as its input.
Her installation, "Kinetic Procession" (2005) at the Center for Contemporary Art in Sacramento, California, was an expanded stage for mark making. It "examines the anonymity of mundane participation of daily processions, revealing fragmental snapshots of what plays through the minds at a subconscious level reflecting the impact of voluntary and involuntary participation." An interactive palimpsestic piece, images of passengers departing a subway are projected onto the audience through layers of transparent plastic covered in marks. These marks were themselves reflected and redundant on the walls and ceilings within a room whose walls were similarly marked.
In her most recent project that took place near a nuclear power plant at Centre d'Art Marnay-Sur-Seine, France, she jumbled the associations of remote recordings of ambient sounds from the local nuclear power plant with varying sounds that people might associate with the word "nuclear," demonstrating their contextual, connotative and charged properties.
A Sacramento, California reviewer described Young's "Las Vegas, China" (2005) installation at the Center for Contemporary Art as having a "cool, impersonal, didactic quality," and in the latest works with the line, one might draw the same conclusions. However if one is open to embrace the full spectrum of readings of her works, from amazement or bewilderment of scientific formulae to a lucid grasp of the technology, one would see the innate humanness in the work harkening back to the six-year old who studiously practiced brush strokes under the tutelage of her master.
