Sylvia (Yixin) Wang’s practice centres on the relationships between memory, consciousness and cognition. She works primarily with painting while forming cross-sensory connections with moving image, sound and text. Her interest lies not in the direct reproduction of memory, but in how memory is reshaped when it is revisited, how it may fracture, be lost or become distorted, and how it reveals new structures and meanings through the passage of time. In her work, images emerge through a calm and restrained visual language, while quietly harbouring an unstable inner pulse that resists easy disclosure, depicting moments that hover between appearance and disappearance.

Wang’s research is informed by contemporary memory theory, phenomenology, and both Eastern and Western philosophies, with a particular focus on how cognition intervenes in recollection, rendering the past not as a fixed fact but as a continually revised space. Her practice draws on Surrealist approaches to the externalisation of the subconscious, exploring how images can become structures that emerge from deeper layers of consciousness, allowing her to maintain a flexible tension between the figurative and the non-figurative. Wang’s works often unfold in a manner that is almost like a whisper, treating the act of making as a continual gesture of touching the inner experience. A gentle yet unsettled sense of breath moves through her images, suggesting a presence that is both tender and subtly unstable. Within this space, image, memory and consciousness do not exist in isolation but permeate one another through a slow and continuous movement. She constructs a visual environment that is at once familiar yet subtly estranged, allowing a space for what remains unspoken and not fully deciphered within the subconscious. Viewers are invited to enter with their own memories and emotions and to develop their own associative readings, so that the act of looking becomes a new generative process in relation to the completed work.