XIAO YANG

Xiao Yang is an intermedia artist whose performance series of works utilize nonlinguistic, bodily communication to explore the physical threshold of one’s own body that challenges the social discipline; while the concurrent painting installation series aims to recontextualize the industrial and chemical material into an artistic medium which is catalyzed by her experience at a Bio lab of that the visual form of the micro-organism under the microscope. It serves as the initial reference for the prototype creating process.

Both of her ongoing series explore the concept of metaphor, linguistic versus non linguistic representation, symbolization, and a sense of boundary. Her work has been focused onto fostering a dialogue regarding the mechanism of collision, conflict, irruption versus the coping mechanism within the notion of trauma. The works also decode the deeply psychological connotations of the mundane objects as Yang explores their (mis)usage within her repetitive actions. Therein, the attempt of her to invite viewers to voyeur the disturbing interactions between living and non-living beings reveals in the recontextualized circumstance. Yang’s works are often presented as video installation, abstract paintings, images, and on-site performances.  The application of the mundane objects to a work can blur the boundaries between art and the objects, the audience and the work itself,  and even between art and common life. These elements are intertwined together for the sake of constructing a new form of narrative. 

  Her performance practice often involved the employment of various mundane objects with a form of performative intervention. These objects serve as a function of the substantialized tropes that create portals for the viewers to enter and gain access from the individual traumatic history to the collective traumatic experience, in which it is associated with social subject matters of vulnerable groups of the population. 

Yang’s installation work explores the possibility of illustrating the individual experience of cultural alienation in both physical and psychological spaces into a tangible form. Her work draws inspiration from the micro and macro and employs scale to reconfigure and substantialize this symbiotic relationship that we have with the universe, as the microorganism lives on our physical bodies that shares the notion of the symbiotic relationship as ourselves to the universe. The subverted scale in between the micro and the macro is for the sake of revealing our own relationship to the gigantic universe which is not very much different than the microorganism to us. The fluid, unnamable abstractions often run parallel to the theme of the uncanny as the artist tries to situate herself within a new culture that is becoming more familiar and her cultural roots that are now feeling more removed, operating between being “home-like” and “unlike home” within a shift of personal identities.

Yang completed her BFA with an emphasis in Painting and Illustration at DAEMEN UNIVERSITY in 2016. She’s been residing in Buffalo, NY, USA since 2009 where she completed her MFA at the UNIVERSITY AT BUFFALO in 2019. She is currently teaching at Visual & Performing Art Department at Daemen College.

Yang’s work has been exhibited in, BuffaloArtStudio of the Trimania event, Tower gallery, Buffalo Artspace, El Museo, The Karpeles Manuscript Library Museum, Eleven Twenty Projects. Burchfield Penney Art Center. etc. 

email: xiaoyang@buffalo.edu

instagram: xiao_yart

Photo Taken by Ni Zhang