The Whimsical Characters

Animated characters who confront, scrutinize, and mock historical icons and stereotypical cultural myths are important components of Yefeng’s practice. Their digital performing bodies refuse encoded identities and explore new relations beyond commonality and difference. Inhuman or anthropomorphic, they probe connections to different spaces, people, and things. In the same vein, The Whimsical Characters investigates such explorations through the liminal network space. In this project, uncanny digital bodies reside on plasma screens as beings of the virtual world. But they continuously attempt to connect to the viewers through emotional outbursts built upon dramatic motion-capture data. The recording data of actual human movements is enveloped in the polygonal virtual “bodies.” Their paradoxical forms lead to an imagination of the interobjectivity preserved in a complex array of ambiguous dimensions.