‘No longer were there individual destinies; only a collective destiny, made of plague and emotions shared by all.’ — Albert Camus, The Plague, (1947)

Visible vs. Invisible is rooted in Wuhan, China – the world’s first city to be locked down due to COVID-19. As a Wuhan citizen, I experienced personally the world’s first COVID-19 lockdown and I have incorporated this experience into my research. Visible vs. Invisible sets out to interrogate the simplistic narrative in which Wuhan becomes the guilty epicentre of a global health crisis.

This work builds on the ongoing and important work of eco-feminist and anthropological writers and artists such as Rachel Carson, Margaret Atwood, Donna Haraway, Fei Cao, amongst others.

The project is presented as a pair – consisting of an artist’s book and situated video. The book draws on Donna Haraway’s concept of ‘situated knowledge’ to celebrate and recognize the importance of situated personal experience, and to examine the broader concepts around the construction of myths through media discourse and to explore the relationship between humans and non-human species. The film contains two key spaces: the Huanan Seafood Market and the isolated interior spaces of the home. By using the coupling technique of the double screen, I constantly switch between my fantasies and the real spatial situation, and in this way create a narrative in which the Huanan seafood market enters my interior life. Using a combination of personal experience and the sound of media coverage I have created a mixed and fluid narrative of the event of the pandemic, while also exploring the multi-spatial boundaries between image and sonic landscapes. My aim is to inspire audiences to rethink their understandings of the pandemic and its origin and to encourage them to participate and create their own collective memories.

Yafei Wang is an artist and researcher based between Wuhan and London. She completed her Bachelors degree in Environmental Design at SCFAI, and is a graduate from the MA Situated Practice programme at UCL where she took the Site-Writing module. And she plans to develop a PhD project in the future.

As an artist, Yafei’s work has been exhibited in London, Wuhan and Chongqing. Yafei is currently working on research into London’s Natural History Museum and Billingsgate Market, in which she attempts to explore the poetry of death and the materiality of dead non-human species, and to explore new understandings of architecture, material culture, and biodiversity by thinking about the relationship between human and non-human species.

Yafei uses experimental film and situated testimony as a spatial practice, providing partial perspectives like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. She seeks to counter the crisis of neoliberalism by taking an interdisciplinary approach to scholarship and to the conservation of biodiversity in architectures and environments drawn from the theory and practice of visual arts, and anthropology, as well as architecture. 

Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015).

Cao Fei, Isle of Instability, (2020).

Donna J. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Duke University Press, 2016).

Hector Macdonald, Truth: How the Many Sides to Every Story Shape Our Reality (Bantam Press, 2018).

Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood (Nan A. Talese, 2009).