Yixin Ye
- Anna Lilli Garai
- Aug 12
- 5 min read
Updated: Aug 13
Yixin Ye is a photographer based in Wuhan, China, with a background in clothing pattern design and landscape installation. His images often focus on abstract shapes, light sources, and patterns found in the city at night. Drawing on years of working with textures, natural materials, and traditional motifs, he approaches photography like a form of visual composition, collecting scenes and treating them as raw materials. In his ongoing series “Unreal City” he explores artificial light, shifting colors, and quiet urban environments to create a fragmented and dreamlike visual world. His work reflects a personal yet shareable way of seeing.
Q: How did your experience in clothing pattern design and landscape installation shape the way you approach photography?
A: When doing pattern design, I would come into contact with and study a large number of traditional Chinese patterns from ancient porcelain, clothing, and architecture. These patterns are generally abstracted from real-world scenes, such as cloud-cranes and flowers. I needed to study their ways of abstraction and sense of order, and then create my own pattern combinations. Later, I extended this set of experiences to landscape installation design as well. I would collect a large number of natural materials, such as sunken wood from Yunnan, China. After processing them myself, I would shape and recreate an image that originally exists in nature in a way similar to sculpting. So, these work experiences naturally influenced my way of seeing in photography. I would regard the combinations of elements in the scenes I see as natural materials that can be captured with a camera, and then look for combinations of color blocks and a sense of order that can touch me. And some basic photography techniques, such as long exposure, use of flash, high-speed shutter, etc., I would treat as tools for me to carry out secondary processing on the materials.
(The illustrations at the end of the article depict the landscape creation process described above.)
Q: What draws you to explore cities at night, and how does that quietness influence the kind of images you capture?
A: During the day, the intense sunlight makes colors appear more textured and tangible, with people active and interacting outdoors—this is the familiar world, beautiful and real. However, I hope to distance myself from the center of events and observe the world from a more third-person perspective. Therefore, as natural light fades and artificial lights along with moonlight take over, it’s easier for more unreal color textures to emerge. The momentary color combinations of LED arrays on building facades, the diffuse reflection of billboards, the hazy light in foggy weather, the reflection of car headlights—all these are more artificial. But when people gradually fall asleep, the world becomes quiet and charming.
Q: In “Unreal City,” what kind of patterns or structures are you most often searching for?
A: At night, the boundaries of most patterns and color blocks are determined by the illumination range of artificial light, which inherently alters and reorganizes the structure of many scenes in the camera.
For example, wires under diffuse lighting appear as colored lines at night. I first seek out light sources, then examine the patterns they create. The boundaries of these patterns change with different time periods and weather conditions—car lights, streetlights, billboards, building facades, and materials that carry their light (stainless steel, marble, glass, puddles, or even the air itself under certain weather). I search for a sense of order and color blocks within these combinations, capturing those that resonate with me. Meanwhile, I also consider the adjustable range for light intervention and the cultural attributes embodied by the objects themselves.
Q: You mention building a new world on a spiritual plane—what does that world feel like to you?
A: The city where I live imposes enormous pressure of life. I can't say I hate this city—it’s clearly unfair, after all, I love my hometown. But to some extent, I do want to escape from this real world as seen from my perspective. Therefore, the world I hope to build through these visual slices must first be partially detached from reality. Throughout my artistic career, I have sought the spiritual world I desire in many ways: for example, serving as a drummer in a rock band, immersing myself in psychedelic rock music, and collecting covers of CDs and vinyl records. The world I want to immerse myself in contains elements of psychedelic rock and a touch of glitch art, resembling driving alone on an empty highway at midnight, speeding through the tunnel illuminated by car headlights. This world is filled with freedom yet tinged with loneliness, traveling on a passage to another dimension, but ultimately reaching a certain place.
Q: How do you balance the real and the abstract when composing your photographs?
A: Photography is unlike painting or AI generation. First and foremost, the tool of photography itself is about slicing the real world in an instant. This idea is also mentioned in Susan Sontag's On Photography. So I'm just abstracting elements from reality, similar to how I process raw materials in my work. As I mentioned in previous answers, many objects and scenes in the real world change continuously over different time periods. The texture of color blocks and their edges presented by different lights vary. Therefore, what I need to do is find the textures and angles I like, and lock them in at the right time. I often imagine how flash, artificial light, or moonlight would present a scene when passing by, and return to the same spot at night to shoot. I don't mind the proportion of "unreality" in their presentation, because they all root in "reality".
Q: Do you see your work as a personal retreat, or more as a shared visual language for others to connect with?
A: I lean more toward regarding my works as a visual language for others to resonate with. Images differ from music—while the rhythm of music can directly reach the heart and quickly evoke emotional resonance, images convey emotions in a gentler and more subtle way. However, when they appear not as single images but in groups, and as pictures with a shared visual language gradually enrich, this world becomes clearer and more directional. Just like some excellent film and television works, sometimes what people immerse themselves in is not the story told in the work, but the virtual world itself constructed in it. I will continue to build this world and hope that people who love it can immerse themselves in it together.
