BIO
Qi-Yao is an artist-researcher working across performance, sound, video, and installation. She is currently a PhD researcher in Creative Arts at Loughborough University.
Her practice centres on the lived experience of individuals navigating social realities and structures of institutional power. Across her artistic trajectory, she has been concerned with how bodies endure, adapt to, and reflect upon conditions of constraint. In earlier works, this attention manifestied through examinations of embodied survival and everyday negotiation; more recently, it has evolved into an investigation of individual agency within data-driven and monitored environments.
Through performative and embodied actions, Qi-Yao introduces disruption, friction, and moments of misalignment into normative systems of order. Often employing subtle provocation and understated humour, her work treats the body as an active site of interference—capable of unsettling established logics of control within contemporary societies.
STATEMENT
My practice is grounded in the body as a situated, sensing, and negotiating presence within contemporary systems of order. I work across performance, sound, video, and installation to explore how individual bodies encounter, inhabit, and occasionally resist social structures that seek to regulate behaviour, perception, and movement.
Rather than addressing power as an abstract concept, I approach it through everyday actions, minor gestures, and moments of misalignment. These actions often unfold within existing infrastructures—spatial, institutional, or technological—where the body is already being measured, guided, or anticipated. By engaging with these conditions through embodied practice, I am interested in how agency can emerge not through opposition, but through friction, delay, and subtle disruption.
Ambiguity plays a central role in my work. I treat performative action as a way of unsettling familiar systems from within, allowing moments of uncertainty or confusion to surface. In doing so, the body becomes a site of interference—one that does not seek to escape control entirely, but to expose its limits and loosen its normative grip within contemporary societies.
SELECTED EXHIBITIONS
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B-side: Hidden Track, BIE Box, Beijing, 2025
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Charging Guide, Ming Contemporary Art Museum, Shanghai, 2025 -
The Stone of Her Mountain, Guardian Art Centre, Beijing, 2023 -
Blue Dream, Nordic Contemporary Art Centre, Xiamen, 2023
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Groups as Methods, CAFA Art Museum, Beijing, 2023
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Youth Today, 798 Art Centre, Beijing, 2023
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Material Girl, China Culture Centre, Sydney, 2022
Art Nova 100 Annual Exhibition, Guardian Art Center, Beijing, 2021-
Hereditary Territory, Powerlong Museum, Shanghai, 2021 -
China Scholarship Council × Loughborough University Joint Scholarship, 2025
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Nominee, Art Nova 100, 2021
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First Prize Scholarship, CAFA, 2021
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Nominee, Zeng Zhushao Sculpture Fellowship Award, 2019
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Second Prize, Fine Sculpture Fellowship, 2018
- TALKS & PUBLIC PROGRAMS
- Artist Talk, Between Sites: Media Transformation and Interpersonal Connection in the Technological Age,
- in conversation with Yao Qingmei, Ming Contemporary Art Museum, Shanghai, 2025
- Panelist, From "The Other" to "Them", “B-Side” Exhibition Talk Salon,
- in conversation with Ni Nana, Dong Si, and Du Xinrui, BIE Box, Beijing, 2025
- Guest Speaker, Queering the Discipline: Bodies Against Order, Queer University Video Training Camp,
- Goethe-Institut China, Beijing, 2024