About

Hi, I’m Yi.

 In junior college, I began to study art writing. I’d loved making art since I was a little kid: drawing, painting, all of it. Even just looking at someone else’s artworks ignited in me an insatiable desire to create. Naturally, art writing quickly became my favourite subject at school.

 There was something about watching it all unfold that was so exciting: picking apart what I could see, and observing — then sitting with — how it made me feel. What it made me think.

 So much of art happens in the subconscious. To study art is to study oneself — how one's mind, both the conscious and the subconscious, processes and reacts to stimuli. What do I like? What do I not like? What emotions am I more inclined to feel? What assumptions am I making?

 My Chinese parents, both raised in a time when poetry was a luxury few could afford, are ever so quick to jump to confusion. ‘I just can never understand it,’ is something they always tell me. ‘Art is too abstract for me.’ Understandably, dismissal and mockery are often the natural reactions to one’s own confusion. After all, it’s so much easier to write off fine art as pretentious, bougie, and probably just a means for money laundering, than to admit that it may sometimes simply be out of one’s depth.

 I started DE+FINE ART ZINE with the aim of demystifying fine art, making it less demanding for the common person to understand (and appreciate).  I know very well what it’s like to visit an art gallery and leave feeling nothing but confused — trust me, I’ve been there, and sometimes still continue to be there. However, reading artworks is a skill that can be learned. Art analysis is really just Literature, except instead of studying the effects of a comma or a line break on our interpretation of a piece of writing, we are studying how colour, lines and composition affect how we perceive a work of art.

 Of course, just because we come to understand a work of art, doesn’t always mean we’re obliged to love it any more. Sometimes art is meaningless, pretentious, ridiculous — and that’s okay. Whether or not we agree with the perceived value of an artwork, learning how to read art helps us, at the very least, become more open-minded and self-aware.

On this site, you’ll find:

• Monthly publications featuring and breaking down works of fine artists
• Reviews of arts events and fairs in SG
• Other art-related blog posts

    Loving art is easy. All it takes is a little de-fining.

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