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Animation (MA)

Ming Yuan

Ming Yuan is a cross-disciplinary artist and filmmaker from China and based in London, UK.

Her professional practice spans stop motion animation, 2D hand-drawing and live action. She has also written scripts for short films and has arranged music for her own animations.

Her background in animation practice began with live action filmmaking and digital art, having completed her undergraduate degree at the Communication University of China. At this point, she has developed a keen interest in materials and tries to capture moments of subtle emotion with intimate textures. She wrote her own script, produced and screened her first animated short film, My Left Face Aged A Little More, which was shortlisted for the 2021 Fenaki Beijing Animation Week, 2021 Beijing International Short Film Festival, 2022 Animex International Animation Festival in UK, and won the 2021 Beijing Film Academy Animation Award, Best Innovation.

In her artistic practice at the Royal College of Art, she created Fossil, a short film that combines dance performance and animation to explore repetitive, timeless time and dilemmas. She attempts to touch the reality of life with image and sound.

https://www.mingyuanfilm.com/

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I try to capture the subtle moments of life's musings through animation. Through my MA studies, I see animation as an unfettered, unbounded vehicle that allows me to express what I want to convey to the world through a combination of materials, forms and new technologies.

I am passionate about combining live action and animation to explore this assemblage of the figurative and the abstract. I use them to convey the flesh and the spirit, to portray the individual as an absolute subject, and his/her feelings and reflections as he/she floats in the world, in a flash of light. Currently, I am passionate about conveying through words, sight and sound the sense of touch, smell and hearing, and the perception of the nature of things as experienced as a human being in an eternal predicament. This perception is wandering, fluid, changing as new realisations are made and old things are forgotten; I simply try to capture this specific and subtle moment, this thought, and try to find a way out of the dilemma.

I draw a lot from literature and film, and some of the feelings in these have been personally interpreted and enhanced in relation to my experience of being alive. I have always had a strong desire to explore new materials and I believe that applying the unique properties of these tangible, tangible substances to the moving image can convey unexpected messages, allowing us to re-experience content that has been dissipated by the repetition of too many traditional forms.