Meet Yujia (Yoka) Gong

We were lucky to catch up with Yujia (Yoka) Gong recently and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Yujia (Yoka), thank you for being such a positive, uplifting person. We’ve noticed that so many of the successful folks we’ve had the good fortune of connecting with have high levels of optimism and so we’d love to hear about your optimism and where you think it comes from.

I have to say, being optimistic considers timing, environment and the people around you. My optimism has been built up in different stages.

“Your day may be happy, your day may be unhappy, but after all it’s still the same day – so why not face each day with a positive outlook?” That is the most cliche saying talking about being positive, which also became the basic belief during my childhood. I still remember after I heard this from my mom when I was in primary school. I needed to work really hard to deal with my emotions whenever I felt angry or sad. For kids, telling them not to be gloomy is the same as sitting them at the top of a slide and not letting them slide down, which means I failed most of the time. However, this cliche saying was also a seed of optimism that my mom planted in my mind.

After that I walked into my school life surrounded by friends, teachers, family and homework. Everything was on such a fast path that I didn’t have enough time to worry about too many things. Even when I felt stressed out, I would always be surrounded by close friends who shared my feelings, family who had been through it all, and, luckily, some teachers who constantly pushed me on. Because of that I always had the confidence to face my adolescence and everything else by knowing there will be someone behind my back.

Things changed a little bit during my last year of college. I started to wonder about my choices, my future, my goals and so on. Everything seemed vague, intangible and unpredictable though this kind of feeling might also be enhanced because of the pandemic. I was not that stable anymore. I reflected on myself and questioned why I was so positive before. After months of struggle, I wrote my answer down as the last part of my final essay :

“There is only one inborn error, and that is the notion that we exist in order to be happy… So long as we persist in this inborn error… the world seems to us full of contradictions…”

This is a quote that I got from Arthur Schopenhauer, which pointed out the key of life isn’t only about happiness but also with misery, anger, anxiety, regret and so many other parts of my own feelings. Being positive is no longer defined by if I can get happy again, it becomes more like the confidence in myself, the courage of making changes and the hope of the future.

Overall, I would like to admit that I am such a lucky person who got all the love and care from the people around me. Meanwhile I’m grateful for being able to turn the love and care that I received into the warmest parts of myself.

Thanks, so before we move on maybe you can share a bit more about yourself?

I am a visual storyteller, always finding ‘new’ narratives in everyday life. What I am doing is about transforming, collaborating, rearranging and manipulating ordinary objects into unfamiliar and unveiling new forms. I enjoy making connections among the objects and people surrounding me. To me, it is a means of discovery in which I navigate and interpret the world and myself.

Thanks to my broad focus, I always challenge myself with new mediums which can be the best fit for specific topics. From multi material sculptures to zines, sound and interactive installations, I enjoy pushing myself and playing with new opportunities, which also led me to further study in the field of digital media.

Zoom out is an audio-visual installation piece I made last year. Unless zooming in, people utilize zooming out less in our daily lives, which involves losing photographic focus and allowing additional distractions to appear. It seems like noise that is gradually amplified.

The viewers can “see” this world in a recognizable yet inverted manner by hearing and experiencing how the space zooms out through the conversion of the everyday mundane video into a sound composition. Every frame is divided into columns of longitudinal pixels, and the brightness of each column of longitudinal pixels is combined to create various sound frequency combinations.

This provided me with a refreshing angle in seeing my life experiences and the world around me, and this is also my focusing point for my current research.

Looking back, what do you think were the three qualities, skills, or areas of knowledge that were most impactful in your journey? What advice do you have for folks who are early in their journey in terms of how they can best develop or improve on these?

Be curious, be bold and be a good executor.

These are the qualities that keep pushing me forward in my life.

I never thought about learning art until I saw how popular the drawings that my friend drew on her own student ID were in our middle school. I never planned to study abroad until I started traveling around the world and jumped out of my comfort zone. I never knew I would play with sound until I came across techno when I went to a club with my friends. I’m not the kind of person who would plan out their life, so these tiny little moments somehow became the pivot points that changed my life.

Sometimes people would ask me whether I regret making those choices, and my answer is always no. I do believe there might be some ‘better’ choices that come up to me from time to time, but I choose to believe in myself and be brave enough to go down that way. And after that, being a good executor is the key for me to not regret what I did.

For me, being curious is already part of my life. But being brave to change and knowing how to keep on going through the path that I choose sometimes need others’ support and courage. I’m always grateful for making the zine project with my friends Yangqi and Fei Wang during the pandemic and also the period when I was applying for studying abroad. Hello, shepherd is the name of the zine talking about the connection between nomadism and friendship which samples me and my friends’ long distance chatting history in one year. Starting from daily greetings to regular sharing about the things that happened in our lives ,to everyone becoming busy with our own studies and involving in other groups of relationships, this zine records our friendship process from the first day we meet till we all move into our new life stages. As our side project back then, all these conversations helped us go through hard times, gave each other company and brought us passion and energy to keep on surfing in art and lives.

As we end our chat, is there a book you can leave people with that’s been meaningful to you and your development?

‘YOU RUN AROUND TOWN LIKE A FOOL AND YOU THINK THAT IT’S GROOVY’

I know I won’t have a perfect answer for this question but for now this funny and absurd book of collages would be my favourite. When every time I ‘read’ it, I feel relaxed and burst into laughter. I just want to remind myself to be playful and try to keep my humour to see the world that I am living in.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://yokagong.me
• Instagram: @ohmygooong_
• Linkedin: https://linkedin.com/in/yujia-gong-42a560300

Image Credits

Yoka Gong