10 Questions with Yu Yan

Yu Yan is a visual artist based in New York, United States. She gained her master's degree in Art, Design, and the Public Domain Program from Harvard University Graduate School of Design and her bachelor's degree in Studio Arts Photography and Economics from Smith College in 2018 as the recipient of the Megan Hart Jones Art Prize.

Primarily working with researched-based projects and site-specific installations, she follows intuitive research pursuits across a variety of disciplines and disparate systems of knowledge in natural and political landscapes. She is interested in the connectedness between personal memory and collective urban scenes, addressing issues around immigration and the diaspora community.

She was an invited artist in residence at Swatch Art Peace Hotel in Shanghai from 2020 to 2021. Her works have been exhibited in Italy, France, Japan, Korea, Greece, U.S., U.K., and China.

www.hiyanyu.com | @1yan1yu

INTERVIEW

First of all, introduce yourself to our readers. Who is Yu Yan in three words?
Artist
Museum-worker
Marathon-runner

What is your artistic background? And how did your studies influence your art today?

I studied art at Smith College and majored in both Economics and Studio Arts. This education gave me a solid foundation in artistic technique and social awareness, which I have combined in my work as a photographer and image-based artist. After graduating, I attended a research program at Harvard University Graduate School of Design, where I worked with Krzysztof Wodiczko, a well-known public artist. Through this experience, I became interested in using interdisciplinary mediums to explore and intervene in social issues in public spaces. Working on a variety of research topics across different disciplines has also sparked my passion for connecting diverse systems of knowledge in natural and political landscapes.

What are the fundamental experiences that shaped yourself and your artistic practice?

My life has been full of adventures and shifts in identity and roles. Attending an all-women's college had a profound impact on many aspects of my life, and continues to influence my decisions today. At Smith, I gained confidence and learned to embrace new challenges. As the only Asian student in my studio art photography class, I began experimenting with manipulated images to explore themes of socio-cultural identity within families. I collaborated with my mother, who lives on the other side of the world, to manipulate digital photos of everyday objects in our lives. This juxtaposition of geographic boundaries and shifting roles within the nurturing relationship, particularly for a growing female like myself, was the starting point for my ongoing interest in identity.
In addition to this, my experiences in the art field have also played a crucial role in shaping who I am and how I interact with my surroundings. I have gained extensive work experience in various art and culture organizations around the world, including Magnum Photos, Aperture Foundation, Swissnex, and the Guggenheim Museum. My responsibilities have been diverse, ranging from communications and research to business strategy and event planning. These experiences have given me the invaluable opportunity to be exposed to cutting-edge perspectives on the present moment from artists, designers, activists, collectors, the public, and organizations. Through my daily work, I have learned to switch between a wide range of information and mindsets, and I approach new knowledge and themes with openness and enthusiasm.

As you mention in your statement, you primarily work with researched-based projects. How do you conduct your research? How do you gather information, and how do you use this information in your work?

The process of conducting research to transforming into artistic language is always a beautiful and unexpected adventure. My most recent work, "The Wardian: Confiscated Plants and Displaced Identities," addresses issues around displacement and migration. I randomly encountered a group of arrested potted plants from the border of the United States at a botanic garden, and I was intrigued by the history behind these mysterious plants.
To conduct my research, I reviewed a compiled list of confiscated plants preserved at the garden and chose a Dendrobium orchid that arrived in the Los Angeles port in 2000 and was archived at the Botanic Garden of Smith College in Northampton in 2001. The flower, originally from Cambodia, designated to Pheng Mai, Wichita, Kansas, had been rescued at the garden for more than 20 years, yet its specific species had not been identified by the experts.
Through archive research and multiple field visits to the botanic garden and Harvard Herbarium Library, I was able to investigate the plant's geographic origins, medical properties, cultural identities, international travel histories, pictorial representations in specimen archives, and its temporary home at the garden. Retracing the journey of this illegally traded, ecologically endangered, confiscated - then rescued - Dendrobium orchid, I realized how disparate pieces of knowledge and powers shape the mechanism by which institutions and legal systems transfer and detain plants.
Five hand-welded metal structures serve as the primary artifacts for my research. The shape of the structures was inspired by the Wardian case, a piece of Victorian technology invented in the 18th century that radically changed global environments and colonial planting. Each structure stands as an individual signifier of the legislative, sociopolitical, biotic, and ethnomedicinal knowledge systems. Inside each structure, multiple prints floating in different layouts contain altered or distorted information and visual documentation. Together, the artifacts enter into a dialogue that invites the viewer to question, beyond the journey of the Dendrobium orchid, our relationship with one another as living beings.

You work with different mediums, from photography to site-specific installations. How do you choose which medium is more suitable for a specific project?

I don't intentionally choose one medium over the other for a specific project because the creative process usually flows around for a while and I need to embrace all different possibilities, experiments, transitions, and failures. This winding process helps me contextualize my own place involved in any social issues I relate to and prompts me to be as versatile as possible - an artist, researcher, interviewer, or organizer.
During my artist residency program at the Swatch Art Peace Hotel, I started a camera-less documentation project called "Blueprints." Inspired by multiple literal meanings of the word blueprint in different languages, I decided to start with actual blueprint paper as my main tool to document the streets and alleys of Shanghai. Using the chemical reaction of the paper itself, I developed my own printing process that can replicate the shapes of historical buildings, city infrastructures, and personal belongings of the residents.
Rather than being distant and objective as a photographer and image maker, I interacted with strangers, which unexpectedly influenced the content and style of every single blueprint. I once met a resident whose neighborhood was in the process of demolition and renovation. She invited me to document the sofa and plants she was moving outside her home on my blueprint papers. In addition to recording her stories as a native resident in that community, I also arranged and captured those personal items on my blueprint paper based on her own preference and design. Our interaction and intervention with each other ultimately became pivotal moments of this image-creation process.
I realized how interesting this project could possibly move forward. I imagine I could use every single micro-neighborhood as a focal point to expand this art project by including some profound archive documents, architectural models of the community, recorded interviews of the residents, blueprints making, and site-specific installations of personal objects. I'm really excited to see how my flexible approaches to project development might serve the community I care about at large.

Speaking of themes, Your work reflects on personal memory, "addressing issues around immigration and diaspora community." How much do personal experiences influence your practice and the themes you work with?

I believe my personal experiences definitely shape the direction of my practice and the community I relate to in our society. One of the pivotal moments happened during my long-term project "New Chinatown Archive" in 2017. At that time, I was particularly interested in observing and capturing the seemingly mundane yet culturally radical moments through a lens, so I started a documentary photography project focusing on the diaspora community in Chinatowns across the United States. I decided to turn my camera to those who work in the food industry, but the process of interviewing and photographing Chinese American restaurant owners, chefs, and waiters was extremely challenging.
While I was peering into the ever-shifting identities of the group, my own perspective and position were often questioned: Who am I? Why do I like to observe Chinatown? What is the connection between Chinese people and Chinatown? The often inevitable and incomprehensible gap between me and my interviewees has encouraged me to be more empathetic about individual histories of immigrants: What exactly fosters every individual decision to migrate, disperse, and then gather together? With this question in mind, in addition to examining issues related to boundaries of geographic and cultural identities, I have also been experimenting with more different mediums and research methods, breaking down my own borders as an artist.

The Wardian_Smith Botanic Garden, 2022 © Yu Yan

Does art have a significant role in addressing such themes?

I believe art has a significant role in addressing themes related to identity. Issues around identity are now conceived as malleable and fluid, and art creates a narrative for us to contextualize the complexity and interconnectedness of our identities in a community, as well as its relationship to various ideological positions in our world. My public art project "Chinatown Inclusion Act" keeps touching upon the marginalization and displacement of Chinese American people by inviting the audience to interactively and collectively navigate through the history and memory of this community.
In the U.S., the Chinese were the first minority to be excluded from immigration formally and explicitly under the 1882 Exclusion Act. The formation of Chinatowns took place as a sphere of self-protection. From a refuge of repressed labors to a tourist destination, a food town, and today's transitional zone under the intertwined waves of immigration politics, tourism, trade relations, and cultural self-fashioning, Chinatown is now full of layers of familiarity and strangeness as a diasporic battleground.
My artwork "Chinatown Inclusion Act" is a series of actions to justify and disseminate the history and identity of this cultural territory. Using Harvard GSD as a testing ground on December 4, 2019, I issued Chinatown passports for strangers and granted them obligations and responsibilities upon passing an exam, as a means to help recognize the dignity of Chinatown people and raise consciousness and communications between outsiders and insiders.
As food has always functioned as an important part of Chinatown's economy and ecosystem, I also collected food memories from locals who work in the food service industry in Boston's Chinatown. By circulating these repacked and relabeled food ingredients, I am also responding to the common ignorance of Chinatown workers' presence in the backstage production process. People were welcome to take a bag of the food (memory) that belongs to a Chinatown stranger and cook with the ingredient at home.
Committed to the involvement and communication with Boston Chinatown's workers and recognition of immigrants' identity, history, and culture, I hope to be able to build effective and long-term relationships with community members and keep my passion for intervening in this specific public realm with many more artworks in the future.

Is there any other medium, technique, or theme you would like to incorporate?

There are many more mediums, techniques, and themes that I would like to incorporate into my work. I have a constant curiosity and passion for exploring the ideas behind representation of images in today's digital world - where we are able to circulate information to a worldwide web internet or manipulate any visual information we perceive from the world in seconds. Conceptually, I'm also intrigued by visualizing the connections between the built environment in the urban space, individuals, and institutions, so moving forward, I might start trying to incorporate more spatial structures and material collages into my image works, reflecting the nature and infinite possibility of seeing, witnessing, reading, and understanding.

You have worked and exhibited internationally; what do you think of the art world? Do you see any difference in the approach artists and people have towards art in different areas or countries?

As an artist who works in an international context, making art in a cross-cultural environment and being perceived by viewers from different backgrounds has always interested me. I seek to use art-making to address problems that my community and I encounter. I believe that Homi Bhabha's concepts on Third Space and Hybridity could be inspiring sources for us to understand art-making in a cross-cultural context.
Third Space is not a specific physical space, but a metaphorical space in which different cultures are located in the process of transformation, exchange, and exerting powers on each other. This third space embeds the artists' own artistic subjectivity, the creative means cultivated by their cultural background, the external artistic feedback they received, etc. Their viewers are also wrapped in this third space by bringing their subjectivity and external factors to understand the artworks. New entities might be shaped in this space through the integration of various forces. This process is often unconscious, sometimes constructed by generations of artists and their viewers. Ultimately, this process can help our communities to form new cultural hybridity.
In this cultural hybridity, the Self and the Other are blurred and it can also help us to resist monolithic or binary narratives. I believe that the approach artists and people have towards art in different areas or countries can be influenced by the cultural hybridity created by the Third Space.

Lastly, what are you working on? What are your future projects?

I always have a feeling that many of my works are not "done" yet and still have the potential for further refinement. When I treat every work as a research project, the perspective and depth of my cross-disciplinary work can be infinitely elaborated and expanded. I quite enjoy this struggling process of creating more trouble for myself as an artist who wishes to make the work done, but on the other hand, isn't it part of the artist's responsibility to be a troublemaker and problem-solver simultaneously in an ideal world?

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