Illustration essay

Words and images by Ying Wang | @yiingstagram

Testing positive explores the use of performance enhancing drugs in professional sport. Positive can be taken more than one way—mathematically it’s a measure of deviation from zero.

But what if you have a numerically positive amount of something that’s qualitatively negative? It’s a clash of the definition of what positive traditionally suggests.

Professional sport represents a highly pressurised space where even the smallest increment can make a huge difference. Often becoming a game of numbers, the athletes’ faces have been covered up reflecting their irrelevance. Bright, almost artificial, colours reflect the foreign nature of performance enhancing drugs to the human body. The duplication of athletes furthers the distortion of testing positive.

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