Yixuan Shao
Bio: Yixuan Shao is an artist based in New York. Her practice is rooted in listening not only as a physiological function but also as a subjective internal experience. She creates installation works to gauge the physical space while her sculptures are inner sounds materialized in visual forms. Selected exhibitions include Wallach Art Gallery, Kavi Gupta Gallery, Block Gallery, Arts Letters & Numbers, Spectrum, The FRONT Arte Cultura, and the Semana Internacional de Improvisación in Ensenada, Mexico. She is the cofounder of Alchemyverse, an artist duo which will be the 2021 AIR at LMCC and 2022 AIR with La Wayaka Current.
www.yixuanshao.com
Instagram: @yixuanshaoart
Thesis Exhibition
Artist Statement: My practice is rooted in listening—not only as a physiological function but also as a subjective internal experience. As an Asian-American immigrant, my routine of grappling with the erasure of both personal and collective memories is more than a survival tactic. While listening outward is to hear the void around me, listening inward is to trace the vibrations and reimagine what other space they could occupy. Together, it is a statement of restoration and preservation.
In my installation works, I spatialize recorded sound to map my interiority and to gauge the physical space. I use image, sculpture, performance, and writing to further transform the space into a heterotopic site. These works are open-ended, inviting the viewers to take part with their own subjectivities. Audio as a material, its substance, vibrational property, and auditory procedure, are emblematic information to process other tangible materials, such as aluminum, paper, and found objects. My sound sculptures are inner sounds materialized in visual forms. Stretched out and slowed down in time and space, these objects speak their alter-egos in noise and silence—two contradicting yet connected margins in soundmaking.
Yixuan Shao and Bicheng Liang, Left Without The Means To Move, (204" x 204" x 180,” Lava rocks, anodized aluminum, bone conductors, pit fired wild clay and sound recorded within, desert soil, amplified microphones, speakers, subwoofers, and other mixed media, 2021); Stir, Full of, Abounding In, (84" x 120" x 3,” Cyanotype collage, rocks, pit fired ceramic fragments, 2021)
First Year Exhibition
Bicheng Liang and Yixuan Shao, Bleikr, (92 x 96 x 84 in, Cyanotypes on Japanese paper, twelve-channel spatialized sound, transducers, bench box, 2020); Bicheng Liang and Yixuan Shao, 隙 / At Intervals, (72 x 108 x 30 in, Earth and fire on aluminum sheets, 2021)
Open Studios
