Meet the Artist // Shuai Yang

Could you tell me about your background and the project you are proposing for this three-month residency here at GlogauAIR?

I was born in China and received my art education in the US. My background is in printmaking, where I learned techniques such as intaglio and silkscreen. Recently, I have been working more with sculptures and paintings that carry performative qualities. Before coming to the residency, I had an idea for research, but not a specific project to realize. I wanted to keep my practice flowing—reading, writing, and sketching—until my intuitions aligned with conceptual progress.

My plan was to continue researching measurement instruments, which I later narrowed down to non-object instruments. For example, historically, people measured with the width of a thumb, which gave rise to the idiom “rule of thumb”; the width of a palm was used for racing horses; or a yard was roughly defined as the distance from nose to fingertip. One curious story is that Henry I of England standardized the length of an ell (the word means “arm” and is an unit of length roughly 45 inches or 114 cm) according to his own arm. Research like this inspired me to reflect on the intersections of measurement with history, language, sensation, and power.

Could you elaborate on the themes you explore in your work?

I want to understand how we use measurement and how we naturalize it as a tool for standardization. One of my sculptures is called Stepmother (Stock). “Stock” refers both to the stock market and to storage. This particular work was influenced by German philosopher Martin Heidegger’s thinking about technology, specifically the idea of Bestand, which in English is translated as “standing-reserve.” When we look at the woods, what a modern citizen sees is a forest as a resource of logs. That way of seeing nature as “a resource for…” is a modern way of knowing the world, which then leads to further actions—cutting down trees, shipping them to factories, manufacturing them into products, and selling them for shelves. The woods thus became a standing-reserve for modern products.

This is one example of how I approach measurement—not only by considering the mathematical and physical questions of what measurement and its instruments are, but also by examining how it shapes our ways of knowing, understanding, and acting in the world.

During the first month of this residency, I began writing quite extensively and reframed my practice as an investigation of the conflicts between lived experience and man-made laws. I ask questions like: What does it mean for something to be measurable? How do you decide a tree is measurable? How do we define measurability or immeasurability? Measurability is always tied to the qualities you choose to observe, the device you use, and the operations of the measuring process. So what have we lost when we say something is measurable?

In what ways do systems of measurement and other social structures shape or affect you? How do you interact with or respond to this context?

In the time ahead, I want to understand what “measurable” means not only for objects, but also for people. We all take on two roles: to measure, and to be measured. From the moment we are born, we are measured. Lately, I have been particularly interested in meritocracy and how, especially in a neoliberal society, you are encouraged to work hard and reach a certain level of success regardless of your background or how you want to live your life. But there are always people who decide what the metric of success is—recall Henry I and his arm. A joke I once thought of is that, since he made his arm the standard of measurement, it should have been cut off and preserved for his descendants as a reference. Every English person after Henry should have had access to his arm when measuring in the unit of ell, in order to follow the standard.

For my family, success for a woman means having a well-paid normal job, marrying a man, and having two or more children. To be an artist, in their eyes, is to be a failure. Artists, in some sense, stand apart from the rest of the world; it often feels as though we do not share the same idea of success. Yet we still function in this so-called “art world,” where external expectations exist: earning top degrees, achieving ever-increasing market value, fitting into institutional structures, and so on.

After years of anxiety and frustration—especially during graduate school—I began to live with this system while often reflecting on its flaws. Reading and writing were a great help to me, as they trained me to embody controversial perspectives. Non-judgmental relationships have been crucial for my mental health. They are especially important because they are precisely what we are losing in an increasingly measurable society. To see measurability in a body is to blur its unmeasurable qualities, to arbitrarily dissect it into parts while ignoring the complexity and uniqueness of the being as a whole. That is a form of body engineering.

Your work involves various artistic forms, such as printmaking, painting, sculpture, drawing, and performance. Could you talk about your approach to each of these mediums?

I learned to make art through printmaking, which is itself a mixture of many mediums. When you make a print, it can involve drawing, painting, and a very physical, kinesthetic process that makes you aware of both material and time. In this way, studying printmaking opened me up to all mediums, with the hope of staying conscious about why and how to use each.

Over time, my primary medium became sculpture, where I work with forms and materials in a very “direct” way. It’s direct because my body is specifically engaged in the processes at every step, which brings about a feeling of physical intimacy. Both the making and the reception of a sculpture elevate unexpected body choreographies. The openness between a body and an object is what fascinates me most.

I have also been inspired by the idea of recognizing natural forces as part of sculpting. I recently traveled to Paris, and outside the Pinault Collection there is a sculpture by Giuseppe Penone: a tree cast in bronze holding up large, heavy stones. The tree was sculpted by human hands, while the stones were sculpted by water over time. Together, the work “makes the resemblance between human thought and non-human growth visible.” His visual language resonates deeply with how I feel about sculpture, and my interest in the natural/man-made relationship is also an analogy to Penone’s concept.

A painted image, for me, is a particular kind of representation that carries a mythic quality. It delivers a kind of punch to the face. If you look around, you realize the world is a space of fluidity, and nothing in it is a still image. With painting, I am exploring the distance between myself and the image in front of me, and trying to locate my relationship to that moment of shock.

Drawing is another important part of my practice. I like it because it records immediacy. In comparison to painting, drawing is less about constructing an image and more about leaving a trace in history. It retains momentary thought, subconscious movement, and the gestures of the body.

There is also a performative dimension in my work, even when it is not always visible. A recent piece, One Meter and Two End, exists as a sculpture, a performance, and a documentation. The sculpture is a steel rod, one meter long, embedded with the word “metre.” The rod is attached with wires to a handle. A photograph was taken to display me holding the sculpture in my hand. By juxtaposing my body with the sculpture in such close connection, I expose the relationship between a body and a measuring device—a body and the representational systems of technological instruments and language. Visibly or made not, performance is my agent in the game between subject and object.