After visiting Yun-Fei Ji’s exhibition in the Wellin Museum, I was also struck by some of the discrepancies between the meaning we took from some of Yun-Fei’s work, and what he consciously meant to convey. As Lainie mentioned, it was interesting that Yun-Fei seemed to be unaware that he had placed many of his figures on the left side of a piece, while it was something that a member of our class noticed and asked about its significance. I also felt that our class conducted a lot of discussion regarding the implications of presenting art in a hand scroll form versus a codex form, etc. before we met with Yun-Fei, and that his responses to our questions regarding the relationship between form and content were a bit more vague than I had expected. I think this speaks to the importance of the viewer when we discuss art, as well as how we read images. In my opinion, readers and viewers almost always construct at least some of the meaning that they elicit from visual art and literature. While some artists create art with the intention of provoking a specific discussion, and doing so by very employing purposeful techniques to create symbolic meaning, other artists create art with the sole purpose of provoking open-ended discussion. In other words, some artists choose to leave the viewer with more responsibility to figure out what the work “means,” than other artists do. Yun-Fei definitely has a specific environmental, social and political subject matter he wants to address and comment on, as is evident from his responses to our questions about his upbringing, inspiration, etc., but it seems that we’ve also created a lot of meaning through or individual interpretations within our understanding of the subject matter Yun-Fei aims to present.
