Jiang creates interactive public artworks that transforms audience members into collaborative performers and builds playful visual dialogues which sustain communities of participants. She seeks to open up the possibilities of expression and communication amongst her audience by facilitating play. She was born in China and grew up in New Zealand.
A series of electro-mechanical sculptures exploring the implicit violence within the domestic sphere. The first project in the series repurposes common household flypaper as musical notation to create a macabre chance composition. An array of light sensors on a player piano interprets the body of each fly as a single musical note. Depending on the relative position of the fly on the paper, a solenoid strikes a corresponding key on a toy piano. A piece of melody can then be played by the audience, where each individual life is reduced to a single musical note.
The second project consists of an upright coffin sized box which forms the exterior. The interior walls are covered with small cuckoo clocks. The artist stands inside unseen by anyone, periodically pecked by the mechanical cuckoo birds. This project is conceived for public performance. The juxtaposition of playful objects such as the cuckoo clock and the toy piano against the imagery of confinement and pain suggest the paradoxical nature of childhood, where playfulness and sadism often coexist.
