Juanping(JP) Yang

Photography (MA)

10053533@network.rca.ac.uk

Shoot by JP Yang in 2025 — This work is set against the backdrop of Eastern history, where women have long existed as the "wandering gender." Through this series of photographs, using body, space, and migration as visual language, it explores the identity and self-redemption of women as "drifters." In the images, an Eastern woman wears a long dress adorned with masks, each carrying a predetermined role imposed by society. The faded white wig hints at the disguise of identity in cultural migration. Against the backdrop of Western architecture in London, she carries Eastern furniture, engaging in a silent cultural dialogue through dance and gaze. In the end, she sheds her disguise, losing her way on the streets of London. These images ultimately pose a question: When the labels fall away, can women find their true selves in wandering? JP Yang

Shoot by JP Yang in 2023 — This photo series stems from observations of women in their self-space. Historically, women have been objectified and confined, designated as "recluses." Women have been deprived of public space, secluded within their homes.Their lives are refined and beautiful, yet they are never truly free. So l created a banquet in which a woman's behavior in the space of the self is exaggerated, and behind the refined and ostentatious life in this restricted space she is invisibly controlled, as if swallowed and bound by countless threads, and then lives in perpetual hypocritical luxury in a day that sees no light of day. JP Yang

In this ethnic group, unlike in patriarchal societies ,women are the heads of the household.Shoot by JP Yang in 2024. — I have always been surrounded by many Zhuang women, they are unique and strong, so l can't help but want to explore this ethnic group in depth.During the production of the project, l painted all the Zhuang props in black. l integrated the Black Zhuang's dress culture, labour culture, wedding culture and funeral culture, and depicted the life of a Black Zhuang woman from the perspective of a woman, expressing the matriarchal society of an ethnic minority. JP Yang

SUNFLOWER — In this series, I attempt to explore humanity’s instinctual longing for “existence,” capturing the raw perception that surfaces when an individual confronts death. As life approaches its end, we often instinctively seek an inner order and meaning. I have constructed a symbolic “theater of death” — a space where the imagery serves as both mourning and performance, a ritual that oscillates between reality and illusion. The red garments, the barren landscape, the gazes, and the still bodies together form a metaphor for the dignity of life and death. I hope the audience can feel an emotional experience that transcends the individual, a contemplation of life’s origins, and a poetic imagining of death.

About

Juanping(JP) Yang is a visual practitioner born in China in 2001. From 2020 to 2024, she primarily focused on studying digital media art, and from 2024 to 2025, she pursued photography at the Royal College of Art. She is curious about the harmony between photography and art. Having long focused on feminist themes, she aims to explore the diverse intersections of feminism and art within the constrained frame of photography. While creating photographic works, she contemplates how to embed her reflections into the images. Using women themselves as a medium for artistic expression, she incorporates durational performances, along with a series of performative acts and carefully designed props, to facilitate dialogue among people, objects, and the environment. Through this interplay, she conveys the conceptual depth of her work, achieving a cross-disciplinary fusion of performance art and photography.

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