Yimin Xiang: The Plate Outlives the Paper

The conversation

What is the work or body of work you’d most like us to consider for Future Archives?

Archives is the word I can't get around; it has been in almost everything I've made. I'd suggest start with The Trophy. It belongs to one strand of the research rather than summing it up, it's the most compact way in.

What question were you circling when making it?

This piece it's an homage to Man Ray, the metronome with an eye clipped to the pendulum. The question I kept circling was awkward: how do you make an homage that isn't just the same object with your name on it?

Man Ray's piece is a set of instructions. Cut out an eye and attach it to the pendulum. Set the weight to the tempo you want. The object is a procedure, and the part carrying the meaning is the part built to be swapped. So I ran the procedure and swapped it. A smiley badge went where the eye had been. A smiley emoji hasn't meant a smile for years, and instead you judge by who sent it. The badge grins.

The black humour then had to be built, which was the harder problem. Humour depends on timing, and printing gives you none of it. The work here is in reverse. The order of operations is fixed long before anything is visible, and then you commit, by the time the thing exists the decision is weeks old. So the black humour here is engineered upstream, in a process with no room for improvisation. I haven't resolved it. Objects that arrive with a procedure attached are what I keep coming back to, and what happens when somebody else runs the procedure again. A print works the same way.

How does memory, preservation, disappearance or record-keeping sit inside the work?

I guess, as a loop, and I've grown more certain of that recently. In another project The Archaeology of Printed Images, 2024-2026, I've been buying copperplates off second-hand markets: plates made to print newspapers and magazines, then dumped when the presses moved on. I clean them and print from them again, then rearrange what comes off.

Matter circulates. A plate vanishes, no record of it, nobody looking for it, and then it turns up on a market and goes back into use. Disappearance turns out to be a phase. That has changed how I think about preservation. An archive is built to stop things vanishing (obviously one of reasons). The plates say a thing can vanish and still come back, altered.

A plate is an archival body. It holds the image in reverse and outlives the paper it printed.

Yimin Xiang

Is there a material, image, object or gesture in the work that feels central to you?

Printing plates. A plate is an archival body. It holds the image in reverse and outlives the paper it printed. It keeps every scratch it picked up from handling, and because it can be scraped down and polished, it keeps a record of its own erasures. The plate is the document, and the print is the record.

Do you see the work as resisting being fixed or explained, or is the archive part of the work itself?

Resisting, mostly. Though the split is a bit false: the archive isn't a container. It's the condition I work in, and it isn't neutral, filing something already decides what it means. So I don't want the work explained all the way down. A piece that can be summarised has been catalogued, and the looking stops. Printmaking is how I slow that down; a printed image takes time to make and asks for time back. Something still ticking is better than something solved.