Across installation, performance and moving image, London-based interdisciplinary artist Cizzoe Yi Wang examines how individual agency is shaped by rules, relationships and social expectations. Drawing on a background in documentary practice and social anthropology, she often begins with situations that appear simple: a participant receives an instruction, one person looks at another, or someone is given permission to act. Once people enter these situations, however, habits, hesitation, cooperation and resistance begin to reshape the conditions they have been given.
In Triangle, three participants occupy a system that none of them fully controls. Signal lights and a shared set of instructions establish the basic framework, but each person’s decision changes what becomes possible for the other two. Cooperation and competition unfold at the same time, while authority shifts between participants rather than remaining fixed in a single position.
Triangle has also been presented in several exhibition contexts. In Game ≈ Role-playing ≈ Rule-setting, organized by Small-Time Project, where co-founder and curator Bowen Zhang described Wang’s work as having “unusual conceptual clarity.” Seventeen artists were chosen from 218 applicants across eight countries and regions. It later appeared in Playground at The Handbag Factory in London, Swanfall chief curator Jialong Miao designated it the exhibition’s “Landmark Project.” In 2025, Triangle entered the discussion at Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts through the lecture Play as Method: Art, Teaching, and Embodied Thought, bringing its participatory method into an academic setting. In 2025, Wang received a Silver Award at the MUSE Creative Awards for Triangle, submitted as a video documenting her installation in the “Video – Art & Design” category. The official winner listing credits Cizzoe Yi Wang as the interdisciplinary artist behind the work.
Wang approaches a related dynamic in Look to the Left or Right, or Neither, where the mechanism is reduced to something as ordinary as eye contact. Three participants work with threads, but only those receiving another person’s attention may continue braiding. Within this arrangement, familiarity and politeness begin to influence who is noticed and who remains outside the exchange. A glance becomes more than a gesture of recognition: it functions as a temporary form of permission. By turning a commonplace social act into an operational condition, Wang makes the uneven distribution of attention physically consequential.
A related negotiation appears in Dancer or Rope Holder? where five performers move among four ropes, leaving knots behind as traces of their changing positions. Here, social relations become physical arrangements rather than remaining abstract ideas. UCL lecturer and visual artist Lars Johansson has similarly observed how the work’s shifting roles give social pressures a visible structure.
To Win Is to Withdraw, shown in Chez Moi at Gallery 46 in 2025, shifts the emphasis toward refusal. Leaving the system becomes a decision in its own right rather than an interruption of the work. Across these projects, Wang treats participation as something that can be accepted, negotiated or withdrawn, rather than as a neutral starting point.
Wang’s practice also extends into live performance. As a lead performer and core performing artist with Small Sample Size Theatre, she has contributed to movement development, ensemble timing and adapting productions to different sites. In January 2025, she performed in Mouth Wash and Razor Blades at The Place in London, a work choreographed by Casper Dillen with music by Gia Dreyer. Built around shifting rhythms, repeated actions and deliberately unstable interactions between performers, the production received positive critical attention, including praise from Bruce Marriott and Megan Harman for its physical energy, humour and ensemble dynamics.
Performance brings these questions into direct bodily exchange, placing Wang inside a structure shaped moment by moment through the actions and responses of others.
In 2024, Wang’s short video I Only Come Here When Everyone Is Gone was screened to an in-person audience at Tate Modern in London, in Tate Cinema on Level 4 of the Blavatnik Building. The Montez Press Radio × RCA CAP Broadcast and Screening formed part of Tate Lates, the museum’s regularly organised evening programme. The Royal College of Art (RCA) has shaped British art through generations of practising artists, including David Hockney, Tracey Emin and Lubaina Himid. Its Contemporary Art Practice programme’s collaboration with Tate Modern and Montez Press Radio connects artistic experimentation with public presentation and exchange. Free and open to everyone, the Tate Lates event placed Wang’s moving-image work before a museum audience within this wider cultural setting. The Montez Press Radio × RCA CAP listing identifies Wang and her work, and her name and the title were displayed on screen during the screening. UCL’s Dieter Deswarte sees continuity across her media in the use of artistic form to investigate lived experience.
Wang’s moving-image practice extends this inquiry into documentary form. Her short documentary Them and Us was selected for the 2021 North East International Film Festival and later nominated in the factual film category of the 2022 Royal Television Society North East and Borders awards.
Since October 2025, she has also been collaborating with Beijing-based Youyou Creative Studio on the development of a second season of the mental-health documentary series It’s Okay to Feel Bad, with Bilibili as the intended platform. Her contribution has focused on the visual development of an episode examining experiences connected to psychiatric care.
The work grew out of two months of fieldwork at the Shanghai Mental Health Center, where Wang developed what she describes as a “socialisation dilemma” as a way of tracing how family relationships, social pressure and generational expectations shape emotional experience. Here, the contrast with Triangle is particularly revealing. In the installation, Wang constructs the conditions and observes how participants negotiate them; in the documentary, she begins with circumstances that already exist and considers how their psychological and social pressures can be translated into images without reducing them to a fixed explanation. The shift from designing a rule-bound situation to interpreting an existing social environment extends her interest in the structures that shape individual behaviour into a different kind of visual practice.
A signal changes and one participant’s options narrow; a glance determines who may continue braiding; another person decides to leave the game. In Wang’s work, each small decision changes the structure others must navigate.
