2025 Designer Profile: Ying Ruan

What year are you?

“4th”

What is your major(s)? minor(s)?

“majors: Media Arts and Design, Visual Arts”

In around two sentences, summarize the major inspiration or influences on your designs.

“By collecting old memories through scrap fabric, thrifted items, and old clothes with previous lives, I want to re-frame ‘deteriorated’ materials into utilitarian compositions constructed to collect new memories.”

What are the major themes of your designs? Is there anything particular that you are trying to convey?

“My memories are memories of memories of memories. Are they true to the past? It doesn’t matter. Only the present me can decide reality. With each recall, I decide what is true from the past I’ve drawn upon. Each memory is evaluated from past recalls. If I no longer remember the source, is this being still “me”?

My crochet pieces can be recomposed in different ways. When the pieces are worn, they collect the memories made. They’re fluid and recomposable, and it reminds me that this is true of my self as well (my work is my body). In this way, the work becomes an archive of memory fragments and a form of processing through documentation. How do we live with the past while also allotting space for new experiences?”

Anything else you would like to share? about the process, materials, unexpected changes?

I hope to convey a fluid conception of existence through the combination of multiple mediums. Besides fabric and yarn, I work with steel wire/solder, hot glue, acrylic paint, plaster, and silicone. The components of my art mimic the way I understand my posthuman/transhuman self to be deteriorated and fragmented and continually recomposed through experience, and their combined existence is an extension of my own.

Visit Ying Ruan’s portfolio here.