YANNIE LO

I work from images of my life and of those I love, from family photographs to childhood drawings of family members. I draw from memories – my own childhood memories, as well as generational memories that exist solely through the words of others, such as those of my late grandmother and the memories she shared with my mother in China. My work often depicts intimate moments with family members and playful scenes of childhood. I thus find my most genuine and vulnerable way of working is by depicting specific anecdotes in my life as emblems that culminate into a larger representation or exploration of my identity. 

Many of these anecdotes relate to my identity as an Asian-American woman, and themes within this identity I often explore include hybridity, racial performativity, and displacement. I recall moments throughout childhood such as pulling back the edges of my eyes in a faulty attempt to be accepted, and obsessively staring at my eyes in the mirror out of pure hatred and disgust. I am thus fixated on my eyes as a symbol or reflection of my attitude towards my racial identity, depicting these confrontations/moments with my eyes in my work.

Moreover, I am interested in how our perception of specific memories is altered at the time of recollection; how lived experiences change the lens through which we view these memories, or even inhibit us from recalling them. Certain memories may be filled with ignorance and bliss at the time they occur but are later tainted by guilt and pain once that ignorance is shattered. I think about my ten-year-old self cluelessly tagging along to therapist sessions in which my parents argued over who was to blame for my older brother’s deteriorating mental health. Varyingly, sometimes the inability to recall a memory in itself speaks on the relationship between memory and self; faded memories of relatives may be emblematic of an inability to connect with past and current family in China. I create to remember these lost memories, to investigate other memories, and to discover new memories. 

Thus, I am fascinated by the process itself and the relationship between these various mediums as steps of transformation and discovery, often moving seamlessly between two-dimensional, three-dimensional, and durational work. The same figures and gestures in my work often appear multiple times and through various mediums, transforming and translating between each iteration, often taking on its own new or altered disposition.  I place no superiority on the different mediums of drawing, sculpture, animation, performance, writing, and painting, nor do I see one as a means to an end of the other. Instead, the different iterations exist both as individual pieces and in conversation with each other.

My most recent venture into clay stop-motion animation as a medium stemmed from the fact that I found it difficult to express many themes, specifically those surrounding my racial identity, through a singular image or object. The nuances of pain and emotions rooted in my experiences feel too pertinent to be reduced to a static image. Furthermore, I struggle with creating visual representations of my racial identity while avoiding tokenization and fetishization of East Asian features. In American society, any POC body is by default a politicized body, therefore I feel that no single image I make will be able to express enough content that can overtake this inherent politicization and reduction into “identity art”.

I am also deeply captivated by movement and the body’s inherent capacity to emote. I believe animation can capture both the emotional physicality of performance and sculpture, and the specificity of writing and drawing. For this reason, within the same film I combine stylized scenes of colourless clay figures performing expressive gestures with scenes of meticulously specific sets and characters marked by localized colour. This allows me to effectively merge moments of pure emotion with moments rooted in reality.

I create as a way to love, and as a way to revisit the moments and experiences that have shaped me. The works I create are not objects, nor characters, but rather figures and entities with their own agency. I require but one thing of the work I make - to be something I feel is precious. Many of the works I create are small in size, sculptures often standing between 5 and 9 inches and paintings often on 9 by 12 inch panels. These hand-held sizes allow the work to feel more intimate and cherished to me. It is only through this intimacy and endearment towards the work that I can hope it is able to resonate with others. Therefore my biggest and most urgent ambition is for the work to feel as emotionally heavy and pertinent to the viewer as its content is to me.