Joey Yu

0:04[Applause]

0:13move that down hello I'm Joey you here are some glamorous pictures of me moving some objects shipping some things.

0:30So I'm a illustrator and animator I do like a little bit of both and I'm really interested in places and people and people in places and how they interact with each other as matt said I we studied at Kingston I went to I went to Kingston. And I did the illustration and animation course.

0:53But I graduated in 2017 so I'm still a fresh baby that's two years that I've been out of school but even in that time I feel like I've learned a lot and also I feel like I've learned what I want and I'm always still learning but this talk is kind of going over some of the things that I've learned so when I think about what I've learned and what I want out of my job I think about this picture which as you can see is very frightening it is a group of maybe 16 15 year old underage teen boys there's a few girls sprinkled in there.

1:35But they're all pretty young imagine me at the front of them.

1:38And imagine them booing me offstage because that happened so I when this was maybe in 2015-2016 I used to work at Tate doing like the ypp program which is like young people's program and our goal was to basically bring young people or people who aren't really in the gallery space and get them excited about the art show them something different we would activate the space we'd put music and workshops on at this particular one we had people just do nothing come and they weren't to just do like a casual stream and then I would do a Q&A with them all these young people came the place was packed it was like one in one out they got on stage I got on stage and they booed me off and yeah that they were doing things that the underage kids were doing stuff they weren't supposed to be doing in the gallery and the whole thing had to get shut down.

2:39But it sounds like a hectic event and it was and kind of like a disaster but I felt so alive and I know it's like I want to be doing this all the time I want to be speaking to people that wouldn't normally be in in environments that they are I want to make things clash uncomfortably I just always want to have conversations and be in a hectic environment I want to be agile and doing stuff on my feet and show people I work that they wouldn't normally see because I think about these kids going home and saying to their friends or whatever I was in tape written and there was this crazy gig so taking that forwards I was at uni and I had I was studying in illustration. And I thought this is the kind of mentality I need to be going forward that makes sense so this is one of the projects that I was most proud of that I did in this winter and it was up for three months it was part of the London women program where women and non-binary artists also celebrated by creating public artworks all over to celebrate the centenary of the women's vote so it's a really good cause this is what I came up with it's kind of like a suffragettes March going across where they would typically have marched 100 years ago.

4:03And I like the idea that the people walking past they're essentially marching alongside because you would walk along with them. And it also says to speak the truth fearlessly and also I stalk the hashtag Shoreditch thing on Instagram and those are people who are posting pictures and all that nobody knows this is my work it felt like something way bigger than me. And it was really nice to be part of something like that technically this is kind of how I made it it was really nice working on a huge scale and that I don't normally work on it's like charcoal collage paper and then colored digitally so it's like nice challenge another thing that I do every now.

4:48And then is like a live during performance thing this was one of the first examples so I have to say thank you to Karen from manufacturing who invited me out to Spitalfields to basically do this and and it was just drawing people having conversations like on all of the drawings were under five minutes and it was really nice experience this then went on to drawing in Greece in Korea this one was in Silicon Valley and it was like kind of fancy it was you can kind of see my paper at the back the whole thing would have taken months and months to make but it was like this launch for mez for an Hermes store in Silicon Valley so it's amazing seeing how the same project can be activated in different spaces and the people that I was speaking to were completely different one thing that I like to say is I always want to keep my work consistently inconsistent if that makes sense so the previous work I showed you was completely different to this.

5:51This is the sort of repeat our drawing stuff that I do so it's all done with materials that are really quick and easy that I can carry on the go so like pencils and paper and I do stuff like that one thing that I've learned is that I find the excess of stuff inspiring and I always try and be really greedy and like read as many books as possible watch as many films and travel as as much as possible this winter I went to Singapore Malaysia and South Korea these are some pictures from South Korea that one I just stole from Google the street one but there's there's like arcade picture I took and like in the fish fish market so you can see the colors and I like to think like each city is has a different fabric and you have to about the color and the texture of the city and try and translate that into your own work is really exciting so here are some pictures that I did from Seoul you can kind of see how I translated the colors the the different bright colors really like fight against each other which I really like there's another one and these are some pictures just from Asia in general but I think you can really tell there's the brightness of color the contrast and also kind of like an unrest which I think is a big thing when I travel to these cities as they're as there's a sense of something always moving as well as I always like the feeling of liminal spaces as well when you're traveling on your own and I do that a lot you you always find yourself in airports and like little ports and things like that where there's moments of silence and you just look at the work around look at the environment around you.

7:34That's one to catch her another thing I find really inspiring is working by myself I hate it. And I hate being isolated and I just like wonder talk to people.

7:46So I always try and like see my friends and have conversations which sparks collaboration. And this is a project I did last year with my friend Wilson he did the poems well we were both really interested in Earth Day so we we came up with this collaboration he did the poems I did the images and I really liked how he writes in caps-lock and it's really bold so I tried to make my work look like it's in caps lock and images that are much bolder than anything I normally do which would have never come about if I wasn't working with him so definitely collaborating with people is one of the most inspiring things.

8:26And I've learnt that from back in the Tate days and things like that traveling is always inspiring to me it's important to live always I found that inspiring I was invited to Brazil for a month so I did all these beautiful drawings and I've called it circle in my drawings beautiful and I did all these drawings in a beautiful place sorry ah I yeah I've got to really immerse myself in environment I was there for months so I was it was a really tiny town it's called trancoso Bahia and I didn't even have roads going to it 30 years ago. So it is all super untouched and the local people are amazing I learned about a dance called capoeira which is like it looks like karate and like people throw their legs in the air but it's non-contact so no one gets hurt that was incredible and so I made work that look like this. And I think hopefully I captured the sort of color scheme and stuff like that that was really good and then to sort of finish off the last project I wanted to talk about is I've learned that you have to manifest the Commission's that you want not everyone is going to know what you can do and it's I think it's worthwhile throwing yourself out there and making things happen doing spontaneous things that you haven't even been commissioned for but just so you can put out the work that you want to be commissioned for that makes sense so I really like music and fashion.

10:04But I don't really have any links to it I had a friend called Matt Maltese who was playing one night so I asked if I could go draw backstage so this is during sound check and then just I'm having a beer behind and then. I went on to drawing at field day which was like basically the combination of all the things that I have wanted in a project from like the hectic running around there being so many people and also me having conversations and speaking to them to the musicians and bouncing off them.

10:40So this is AJ Tracy this is just in the field this is Locarno on stage that's me on stage also like it wasn't even the schedule for me to draw them I just like had some conversations and like there were some people that I recognized so I managed to get myself up on there.

10:59So yeah make sure you're always speaking to people gets you places you would never have ever thought you could get that's pretty much me. That's a drawing [Applause]

11:16[Applause]