Alchemy Inside
Kaite Yang
The featured Creative Works artist for this issue of the Apologia is student Kaite Yang, ‘09. She is originally from Baltimore, Maryland, and is double majoring in Anthropology and Psychological and Brain Sciences. Kaite is interested in medical anthropology, public health and visual culture.Kaite’s love affair with art began when her grandfather taught her calligraphy before she could write and continued throughout grade school with studio studies in graphite, pastel, charcoal and European and Chinese watercolor. Watercolor remains her favorite medium because of its luminosity.
At Dartmouth, Kaite wants to elucidate the intersections between visual art, medicine and anthropology, and delineate expressions of truth, grace, redemption and sanctification.
Stirring My Breath
In Alchemy Inside, I seek the images and associations that capture or elaborate the brokenness of the self, which is a necessary realization and central truth in Christian faith. Although we are vessels to be broken, there is a strange paradox in that we must die to ourselves and find new life in Christ. All the while we still live in the flesh of our old selves and a blighted world with all the temptations, frailty and pride of fallen man. Every time the self fragments and sunders, sanctification remains after all this mess. Following this truth, I hope to capture both the uncomfortable oddness of transformation as well as its beauty.
Window
Flutter/Beat
Organs of the human body have always struck me as particularly graceful. In Alchemy Inside, I use their associations to capture certain tensions that arise when our imperfect selves break and transform to the image of Christ. The transformation of one element to another that is completely different—and often truer and holier—implies a change like alchemy. Organs work particularly well as symbols of flesh, human nature and internal processing: what happens “inside” us.
Fruit