Yiyang Chen’s work sits in that place where theory and touch aren’t fighting for space but working together. A Glasgow-based Chinese artist and researcher, she moves between painting, moving image, ceramics, performance, and writing with an ease that comes from both years of training and a willingness to experiment. What keeps all of it tied together is a steady focus on the body–its surfaces, gestures, and edges–and how those are shaped, watched, and sometimes bent out of shape by culture, technology, and myth.
She’s now at a point in her career where her work is gaining traction in the world of art. With exhibitions across the UK, Europe, and Asia, she’s carving out a reputation as someone who can bridge research with practice into one.
In Myths of Disavowal (2024), oil and acrylic on canvas come together in a scene that refuses to settle. Shapes hover somewhere between familiar and strange: part of a table, a patch of green, a reddish vertical stripe, and a white mark that could be a cloud or some torn cloth. The interior space feels fractured, like a memory replaying but not quite in order. The title hints at her ongoing interest in how certain stories–especially about women and non-binary people–are told but also pushed away. The painting mirrors that, holding back from offering a full, neat picture. The canvas surface becomes a kind of stand-in for skin, layered and hidden but still letting something through.
Her performance The Maid, The Bride, The Body (2022) makes that metaphor physical. The work pairs a video of a figure in a huge white hoop skirt with the skirt itself, stitched and collaged with images. During the performance, Chen hand-stitched these collages in a dimly lit space while streaming live on Instagram. The hoop skirt, once a restrictive and showy garment, becomes a surface for projection and change. Light and shadow move across it with each stitch. She pulls in Laura Mulvey’s film theory but pushes past it, looking at how East Asian women’s bodies are reframed not just in film but in online spaces, with all their filters and quick-fire judgements. In her hands, the skirt stops being a relic of control and starts being something that pushes back.
The Shimmer (2025) feels quieter but still lands hard. A white textile printed with a black-and-white photograph of a fancy, object-packed room hangs on the wall. Two small metal grommets puncture the picture, and from them hang pale cords that loop on the floor. They look like drawstrings or tendons, spilling out of the flat image into the room. It’s a small but sharp move that breaks the sealed feel of the old photo, making it porous, a thing you could reach into. Touch here isn’t just sensory–it’s a way of poking at history to see what spills out.
Across these works, Chen’s idea of “becoming monstrous” turns up again and again, but not in a horror-movie way. The monstrous here is about refusing to fit neatly into the boxes people set up. In painting, that refusal shows in incomplete or slippery forms. In performance, it’s about changing the meaning of an object by working on it in real time. In textiles, it’s the body leaking out into a picture that wasn’t meant to hold it.
She’s careful with her materials. In paint, she leaves some of the canvas bare so the work can breathe. With fabric, she leans into its softness and how it can hold memory. In video, she treats light and projection almost like another physical material, layering them until you can’t tell where one stops and the other starts. In The Shimmer, the empty spaces aren’t really empty at all–they hold their own weight, like a pause in conversation that makes you notice what’s around you.
She’s also good at taking theory and turning it into something you can actually feel. While her work nods to 1970s feminist theory, she doesn’t just recycle it. She points out where it misses things, especially around race, class, and sexuality, and folds in other ways of thinking, like trans theory, to open more possibilities. That mix keeps the work grounded in her own cultural background while still being able to connect across different audiences.
Her shows have reached people in the UK, Germany, China, and South Korea, and it’s easy to see why. The themes are big enough to cross borders, but the way she handles them feels personal and specific. Her teaching and research keep her in conversation with others, which probably feeds into how responsive her work feels.
What stands out most is how she treats the body as a collaborator rather than just a subject. In The Shimmer, it’s there in the cords spilling from the picture. In The Maid, The Bride, The Body, it’s partly hidden but still driving the work. In Myths of Disavowal, it’s there in the fragmented space, felt more than seen. It’s a body that doesn’t sit still, that crosses lines, that turns its own surface into a site of both play and resistance.
Her work invites you to take your time. In a world where everything is pushed to grab you fast, Chen’s pieces slow you down. This isn’t slowness for show–it’s enough to make you notice the tiny shifts in texture, the spaces between marks, the way light falls on a fold of fabric.
In the end, Chen’s art reclaims skin–not as a wall, not as something to be put on display, but as a place where contact happens, where care is possible, and where things can change. She shows that painting can peel things back, performance can take ownership, and textiles can open cracks in the past. Her work doesn’t just stay in the gallery; it sticks with you, shifting how you look and maybe even how you touch.
