Yolanda He Yang

Artist Statement

Yolanda He Yang is a China-born, Boston-based installation and performance artist whose practice engages natural materials, such as dust, dirt, and debris, to write ephemeral “eco-letters” that mourn, honor, and question the invisible forces shaping how we live and remember. Raised in a Catholic family in Northern China, her work draws from embodied rituals and inherited silence, using gestures of care to explore the tension between personal histories and collective ecologies. Rooted in maintenance art and relational performance, her recent projects unfold through slow, site-specific acts, dusting demolition sites, tracing ground surfaces, and composing temporary marks with found matter. In these quiet performances, she explores kinship with the more-than-human world and reflects on the politics of labor, impermanence, and belonging.

Yolanda Yang_Perishable Floor -Performance Documentation_Performance Documentation_2025_RAIR, PA

Bio

Yolanda He Yang is an installation and performance artist born and raised in a Catholic family in North China. Growing up through frequent relocations between homes, schools, and playgrounds shaped her sensitivity to impermanence, labor, and lived environments. Her work draws on subtlety and ephemerality as quiet yet powerful forces tied to materiality and storytelling. Through site-responsive practice developed across diverse geographies, she engages each place through observation, embodied response, and collaboration with local ecological and social systems. Her recent residencies span from prehistoric landscapes in Cairo and Luxor, Egypt, to a demolition and construction recycling site at RAIR (PA), agricultural cornfields at Villkulla Residency (NE), and an upcoming nature-based residency at the Marble House Project (VT). Across these contexts, her research uncovers layered temporalities, environmental memory, and the invisible labor embedded within each site. Yolanda’s work has been exhibited in both public and indoor spaces, including Harvard Square, Brookline Arts Center, The Rose Kennedy Greenway, Vox Populi (Philadelphia), Flux Factory (New York), Villekulla Farm (Nebraska), and MG Space (Beijing), among others. She is a recipient of support from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the Mayor’s Office of Arts and Culture in Boston, Collective Future Fund, Boston Chinatown Community Grant, and Cambridge Arts Association. A 2025 MassCreative Fellow, she leads Behind VA Shadows, amplifying the creative voices of frontline museum workers. She holds an MS in Arts Administration and an MFA in Sculpture from Boston University.

https://www.yolandayanghe.com/