For Yiyi Wang, a city becomes personal at the moment it is reframed. Two people can stand in the same place and notice entirely different visual qualities. Her own attention goes first to colour—not isolated colour, but the relationship between colours under a particular light—followed by tension, contradiction and emotion.
That way of seeing grew from an early life around drawing and painting. Photography arrived later through a smartphone and then a camera from her uncle, but composition already felt familiar. The camera gave another structure to habits of looking she had been developing for years.
Once you see colour in the shadows
Wang compares her attention to colour with Impressionist painting. A red object or blue sky is less interesting than the subtle colour inside a shadow, the reflected warmth inside a dark area, or the way several tones shift together as the sun changes.
Once you become aware of the colours within shadows, you can never really ignore them again.
Once those relationships become visible, she says, they are difficult to ignore. Narrative enters afterward through contradiction and emotion. A scene may contain a strong human story, but without a compelling relationship between colour and light she may not notice it first.
Berlin’s parks as a vacuum of information
Berlin’s parks are important to Wang because they feel unusually unprocessed. Compared with the parks she knew in Beijing—where designed elements such as paving, lights, bridges and railings can remain highly visible—Berlin’s green spaces often feel more sharply separated from the city around them.
She describes entering them as briefly stepping into a vacuum of information. Vegetation, light and the lower angle of the northern sun create smooth tonal transitions that remind her of painting.
Learning that places such as Tiergarten are shaped by the tradition of the English landscape garden complicated that impression in an interesting way: even a space that appears natural can be a designed imitation of nature.
What a frame says about the photographer
Wang believes every photograph reveals the person making it through choices: what is included, what is excluded, what attracts attention and what is ignored. Her concise formulation is that a photograph can expose sensitivity, decision-making and even the size of the photographer’s ego.
Her background in painting reinforces that awareness. She is accustomed to checking and reassessing composition, but also to asking what makes a medium irreplaceable. Photography does not exist separately from art history, yet it must still justify what it can do specifically as photography.
The roll that disappeared
One roll once travelled with Wang across several countries and continents. In a single strip of film, different cultures and landscapes sat beside one another: similar palettes recombined in different ways, familiar forms altered by small details.
Then the lab lost the roll.
The experience made her stop shooting film for several years. The loss was not only about missing images; it damaged trust in the people handling the physical process. Wang distinguishes that from the normal uncertainty of analogue photography. Film can fail and cameras can fail, but handing irreplaceable material to someone else requires a different kind of confidence.
The lost roll also sharpened her sense of living between cultures. Places can feel like separate universes and, at other moments, unexpectedly similar. Knowing several cultural contexts at once can produce its own loneliness when those connections remain invisible to people who know only one of them.
Photography without making everything “art”
Although Wang works within contemporary art, she has deliberately kept photography partly separate from that practice. Sometimes, she says with humour, not everything needs to become so artistic.
That distance is part of why Cindy Sherman’s conceptual portraiture interests her. Sherman demonstrates how completely the portrait can be used as a constructed medium: costume, character and viewpoint organise how a viewer looks.
Wang is not yet comfortable with portraiture or with being photographed herself. Precisely because of that discomfort, she imagines future self-portraits using costume or cosplay, taking the familiar information of her own face and making it strange enough to provoke reflection.
Other places as mirrors
The idea Wang most wants to leave with a reader is not simply to look harder at unfamiliar places, but to use them as mirrors for familiar ones.
Use other places as mirrors through which to look back at the spaces you already know.
Travel changes perception of home. A different latitude changes the height of the sun; another culture changes what seems normal; a new landscape makes small details in an old one newly visible. Photography can hold those comparisons long enough for us to recognise them.
A city becomes personal through what we choose to notice. Sometimes we only understand those choices after leaving it.
Developing Stories is a Berlin Photo Studio editorial series about the people, memories and lives behind photographic practice.
