{"id":23631,"date":"2025-07-23T09:28:07","date_gmt":"2025-07-23T09:28:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/visualartjournal.com\/?p=23631"},"modified":"2025-07-24T00:01:13","modified_gmt":"2025-07-24T00:01:13","slug":"yiyang-chen","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/visualartjournal.com\/2025\/07\/23\/yiyang-chen\/","title":{"rendered":"Yiyang Chen"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t<div data-elementor-type=\"wp-post\" data-elementor-id=\"23631\" class=\"elementor elementor-23631\" data-elementor-post-type=\"post\">\n\t\t\t\t<div class=\"elementor-element elementor-element-fc80adf e-flex e-con-boxed e-con e-parent\" data-id=\"fc80adf\" data-element_type=\"container\">\n\t\t\t\t\t<div class=\"e-con-inner\">\n\t\t\t\t<div class=\"elementor-element elementor-element-f57421c elementor-widget elementor-widget-text-editor\" data-id=\"f57421c\" data-element_type=\"widget\" data-widget_type=\"text-editor.default\">\n\t\t\t\t<div class=\"elementor-widget-container\">\n\t\t\t<style>\/*! elementor - v3.21.0 - 22-05-2024 *\/\n.elementor-widget-text-editor.elementor-drop-cap-view-stacked .elementor-drop-cap{background-color:#69727d;color:#fff}.elementor-widget-text-editor.elementor-drop-cap-view-framed .elementor-drop-cap{color:#69727d;border:3px solid;background-color:transparent}.elementor-widget-text-editor:not(.elementor-drop-cap-view-default) .elementor-drop-cap{margin-top:8px}.elementor-widget-text-editor:not(.elementor-drop-cap-view-default) .elementor-drop-cap-letter{width:1em;height:1em}.elementor-widget-text-editor .elementor-drop-cap{float:left;text-align:center;line-height:1;font-size:50px}.elementor-widget-text-editor .elementor-drop-cap-letter{display:inline-block}<\/style>\t\t\t\t<p>Year of birth: 1998<br \/>Where do you live: Glasgow, UK<br \/>Your education: The Glasgow School of Art, Practice-Led PhD in Fine Art, UK, 2023 \u2013 Present; MA (Distinction), M.Litt Fine Art Practice (Painting), UK, 2021\u20132022; Lu Xun Academy of Fine Arts, BA Fine Art (Oil Painting), China, 2016\u20132020<br \/>Describe your art in three words: Liveness, queer, speculative<br \/>Your discipline: Painting, moving image, performance, ceramic, writing<br \/><strong><a href=\"https:\/\/chenyiyang.cargo.site\/\">Website<\/a> | <a href=\"https:\/\/www.instagram.com\/yiyang_painting\">Instagram<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<div class=\"elementor-element elementor-element-04a82fd e-flex e-con-boxed e-con e-parent\" data-id=\"04a82fd\" data-element_type=\"container\">\n\t\t\t\t\t<div class=\"e-con-inner\">\n\t\t\t\t<div class=\"elementor-element elementor-element-6cf0829 elementor-widget elementor-widget-text-editor\" data-id=\"6cf0829\" data-element_type=\"widget\" data-widget_type=\"text-editor.default\">\n\t\t\t\t<div class=\"elementor-widget-container\">\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<h4><img fetchpriority=\"high\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter wp-image-23618 size-full\" src=\"https:\/\/visualartjournal.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/07\/Yiyang-Chen-Untitled-2025.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"1050\" height=\"998\" srcset=\"https:\/\/visualartjournal.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/07\/Yiyang-Chen-Untitled-2025.jpg 1050w, https:\/\/visualartjournal.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/07\/Yiyang-Chen-Untitled-2025-300x285.jpg 300w, https:\/\/visualartjournal.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/07\/Yiyang-Chen-Untitled-2025-1024x973.jpg 1024w, https:\/\/visualartjournal.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/07\/Yiyang-Chen-Untitled-2025-768x730.jpg 768w, https:\/\/visualartjournal.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/07\/Yiyang-Chen-Untitled-2025-600x570.jpg 600w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1050px) 100vw, 1050px\" \/><\/h4><h4 style=\"font-weight: 400\">Your practice spans painting, video, ceramics, performance, and writing. How do you decide which medium to use for a specific idea?<\/h4><p style=\"font-weight: 400\">Thank you for the question. This has actually been asked a lot! In most cases, I do not see the medium in the first place. However, I tackle the materials with care, serving the exploration of my hand-touch sensibility. I let my hands take the lead to encounter and record the sensations my body and I feel about the materials\u2014whether clay, canvas, or just sheets of paper. I investigate making and writing as creative approaches, as bodily engagements, and as self-reflexive configurations.<\/p><h4 style=\"font-weight: 400\">Much of your work explores themes like the monstrous, touch, and the gaze. What drew you to these particular concepts?<\/h4><p style=\"font-weight: 400\">My research started with a focus on body politics entrenched in both the East and the West\u2014from mythology to Laura Mulvey\u2019s gaze theory and representations, to demonised female figures in artefacts, and the concept of abjection articulated by Julia Kristeva. The most striking and empowering reading I encountered, which led me to delve into the cultural definitions of monsters in societies, was trans scholar Paul B. Preciado\u2019s brilliant speech\/book Can the Monster Speak? (2019), and his definition of \u201cmonsters\u201d as entities whose faces, bodies, and behaviours cannot yet be considered true within a predetermined regime of knowledge and power. I am thinking of metaphors for a speaking body or a censored body. This is rooted in my embodied \u201creading\u201d experience, whether it involves texts or images. My practice delves into a monstrous manifestation in which the \u201cbody\u201d gives material form to an idea that has no form\u2014an assemblage that is abstract.<\/p><p style=\"text-align: center\"><img decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-23619 size-full\" src=\"https:\/\/visualartjournal.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/07\/Yiyang-Chen-Myths-Of-Disavowal-2024-3.Jpg.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"1050\" height=\"1352\" srcset=\"https:\/\/visualartjournal.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/07\/Yiyang-Chen-Myths-Of-Disavowal-2024-3.Jpg.jpg 1050w, https:\/\/visualartjournal.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/07\/Yiyang-Chen-Myths-Of-Disavowal-2024-3.Jpg-233x300.jpg 233w, https:\/\/visualartjournal.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/07\/Yiyang-Chen-Myths-Of-Disavowal-2024-3.Jpg-795x1024.jpg 795w, https:\/\/visualartjournal.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/07\/Yiyang-Chen-Myths-Of-Disavowal-2024-3.Jpg-768x989.jpg 768w, https:\/\/visualartjournal.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/07\/Yiyang-Chen-Myths-Of-Disavowal-2024-3.Jpg-600x773.jpg 600w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1050px) 100vw, 1050px\" \/> Yiyang Chen | Myths Of Disavowal | 2024<\/p><h4 style=\"font-weight: 400\">What role does research play in your creative process? Could you share how a recent work emerged from your research?<\/h4><p style=\"font-weight: 400\">As an artist and PhD researcher, I draw a clear line between research and visualisation, as I carefully resist the idea that academic writing describes\/speaks for what I have done in my hands-on, studio-based practice. Or put another way, I refuse to ruin the fun by framing things to serve specific terms. I did a funded performance project this year in Vienna, which was also a week-long archival research project where I examined the Viennese museum and library collections as sources, surfaces, and post-colonial sites. Through bodily engagement and acts of making and writing, my gestures\u2014captured by the camera in this performance\u2014challenge the institutional roles in preservation, interpretation, gatekeeping, hierarchy, and racism.<\/p><h4 style=\"font-weight: 400\">Your exhibition Someday Somehow challenged digital representations of East Asian women. How did audiences respond to that work?<\/h4><p style=\"font-weight: 400\">Someday Somehow (2022) was my first-ever solo exhibition, in which I intended to claim the gallery space with my video installations as a form of resistance against the representation of East Asian women\u2019s body image as highly commercialised and an integral part of the capitalist mode of gaze entertainment\u2014considering the reward systems, comments and gifts that can be directly transformed into benefits and income. I basically just hate how it works. It inevitably reinforces the distorted East Asian beauty standards shaped by impressions of pale skin, slim figures, etc. I invited people who visited and entered the space to rethink their position in viewing\/consuming these subjects, formed by this \u201csymbolic order,\u201d shaped by a different cultural and political context. I\u2019m still very grateful for all the stories and opinions they shared with me\u2014such as how they found this East Asian perspective resonated with them, but with a sense of \u201cunfamiliarity.\u201d All very interesting and thought-provoking for me, which pushed my practice further.<\/p><p style=\"text-align: center\"><img decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-23620 size-full\" src=\"https:\/\/visualartjournal.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/07\/Yiyang-Chen-Myths-Of-Disavowal-2024.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"1050\" height=\"1532\" srcset=\"https:\/\/visualartjournal.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/07\/Yiyang-Chen-Myths-Of-Disavowal-2024.jpg 1050w, https:\/\/visualartjournal.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/07\/Yiyang-Chen-Myths-Of-Disavowal-2024-206x300.jpg 206w, https:\/\/visualartjournal.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/07\/Yiyang-Chen-Myths-Of-Disavowal-2024-702x1024.jpg 702w, https:\/\/visualartjournal.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/07\/Yiyang-Chen-Myths-Of-Disavowal-2024-768x1121.jpg 768w, https:\/\/visualartjournal.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/07\/Yiyang-Chen-Myths-Of-Disavowal-2024-600x875.jpg 600w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1050px) 100vw, 1050px\" \/> Yiyang Chen | Myths Of Disavowal | 2024<\/p><h4 style=\"font-weight: 400\">How does working between Glasgow and your Chinese background influence your artistic identity?<\/h4><p style=\"font-weight: 400\">Such a great question! I think about this a lot. My hometown, Shenyang\u2014a major city in the northeast of China\u2014shares similarities with Glasgow in terms of the last century\u2019s industrial history, unavoidable urban decay, warm people, cold winters, and salty food. I like the novel Shuggie Bain (2020) by Douglas Stuart, which illustrates a vivid picture of a Glaswegian working-class family and the broader industrial backdrop of the 1980s. I\u2019ve heard quite a few similar stories from members of my family from the previous generation. My artistic practice is highly driven by embodied experience that spans both where I come from and where I currently live. This is the way I devote my genuine emotions and feelings to my work, so that every piece of memory and transgenerational story is valid in this self-analytical approach to fine art practice.<\/p><h4 style=\"font-weight: 400\">There\u2019s a strong physicality in your work\u2014especially around gesture and touch. How important is the body in your art?<\/h4><p style=\"font-weight: 400\">I answered a similar question from the audience in the Q&amp;A section of a conference at the University of Edinburgh this month. I perceive the body as a carrier or container for my feelings and sensations, as described by Ursula K. Le Guin. Embodied practice is part of the legacy left to us by 1970s feminism\u2014a sustainable way of living. Even if you can\u2019t afford a studio, you can still carry on, finding your voice and speaking for yourself through the body. The powerful performance artists Carolee Schneemann, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, and filmmaker Chantal Akerman were so important\u2014and still are.<\/p><p style=\"text-align: center\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-23621 size-full\" src=\"https:\/\/visualartjournal.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/07\/Yiyang-Chen-Psychic-Home-2025.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"1050\" height=\"1112\" srcset=\"https:\/\/visualartjournal.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/07\/Yiyang-Chen-Psychic-Home-2025.jpg 1050w, https:\/\/visualartjournal.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/07\/Yiyang-Chen-Psychic-Home-2025-283x300.jpg 283w, https:\/\/visualartjournal.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/07\/Yiyang-Chen-Psychic-Home-2025-967x1024.jpg 967w, https:\/\/visualartjournal.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/07\/Yiyang-Chen-Psychic-Home-2025-768x813.jpg 768w, https:\/\/visualartjournal.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/07\/Yiyang-Chen-Psychic-Home-2025-600x635.jpg 600w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1050px) 100vw, 1050px\" \/> Yiyang Chen | Psychic Home | 2025<\/p><h4 style=\"font-weight: 400\">Are there particular artists, writers, or theorists who have significantly shaped your thinking?<\/h4><p style=\"font-weight: 400\">Absolutely\u2014apart from all those I mentioned above, I would also like to highlight Audre Lorde. Her essay Uses of the Erotic(1978) discusses the cost of detaching the erotic as a source of power, and how the erotic itself holds the potential to create change. She writes, \u201cthe erotic is a resource within each of us that lies in a deeply female and spiritual plane, firmly rooted in the power of our unexpressed or unrecognized feeling. In order to perpetuate itself, every oppression must corrupt or distort those various sources of power within the culture of the oppressed that can provide energy for change.\u201d Also, Bell Hooks and Black feminist art practices, trans studies by Susan Stryker, Chinese queer studies by Hongwei Bao, queer of colour theorist Jos\u00e9 Esteban Mu\u00f1oz, as well as The Argonauts (2015) by Maggie Nelson\u2014which I\u2019ve been reading recently\u2014have given me deep insights into finding my voice and stance on agency.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Year of birth: 1998Where do you live: Glasgow, UKYour education: The Glasgow School of Art, Practice-Led PhD in Fine Art, UK, 2023 \u2013 Present; MA (Distinction), M.Litt Fine Art Practice (Painting), UK, 2021\u20132022; Lu Xun Academy of Fine Arts, BA Fine Art (Oil Painting), China, 2016\u20132020Describe your art in three words: Liveness, queer, speculativeYour discipline: [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-23631","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-interviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/visualartjournal.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23631","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/visualartjournal.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/visualartjournal.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/visualartjournal.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/visualartjournal.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23631"}],"version-history":[{"count":25,"href":"https:\/\/visualartjournal.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23631\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":24112,"href":"https:\/\/visualartjournal.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23631\/revisions\/24112"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/visualartjournal.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23631"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/visualartjournal.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23631"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/visualartjournal.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23631"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}