Interview with yy?
Feeling the granularity of pain

Editor's Note: The interview presents a feminist practitioner with a strong critical consciousness, exploring the echoes reverberating between the self and the world. Taking conflicts with “family” as a starting point, yy? reflects on childhood memories, gender suppression, and relational structures and the gradual building of her sense of political consciousness during her years abroad. Her self-weaving across geographies and disciplines is always grounded in bodily experience. Both as a form of recording and an act of acknowledgment, it has an expressiveness that hovers between everyday perception and social structure. In the face of structural disempowerment and cultural displacement, she responds to reality with honesty and self-sufficiency, rendering the emotional contours visible through art. These practices cast light on the trajectory and outline of a contemporary Chinese woman artist in complex circumstances.

By yy?; Jenny Chen

A Multifaceted Childhood

JC: Please briefly tell us about your upbringing and educational background.

yy?: I was born in an administrative community built around a collective steel mill in Shandong and grew up in a highly collective environment. My mom was injured in a car accident when I was five or six and spent years getting medical treatment in another city. I learned to live on my own from elementary school on, moving between the homes of relatives and family friends. My parents did not return until I was in third grade. This somewhat atypical “left-behind-child” experience gave me a visceral understanding of family, dwelling, and the role of patriarchy in the household.

The huge amount of medical expenses forced my dad to quit the state-owned enterprise he worked for, and we moved to a coastal city with a private steel mill. This shift—from state-owned to private—epitomized the transformation many working-class families in the north were undergoing back then. My mom was a middle-school teacher and my dad, an engineer. We were a typical “steel family” living in the factory-centered residential community. Workers and cadres lived on different floors of the same building. Beneath the seeming uniformity on the surface, there was a clear sense of class distinction. As a child, walking down the street meant seeing workers in blue uniforms everywhere. Almost every household had someone working at the steel mill. The “equality” was, in fact, an illusion produced by poverty and homogeneity, carrying with it a Maoist legacy that negated gender difference.

I lived there until I was fourteen or fifteen, then decided to study in Australia. After high school, I moved to the UK to complete my bachelor’s and master’s degrees. Almost from the moment I went abroad, I was drawn to artistic creation, almost unconsciously.

JC: You said you never felt much urge to go home. Why was that?

yy?: Recently, a joke’s been circulating on social media saying that “women in Shandong are not allowed to eat at the table.” This kind of gendered segregation is more or less ubiquitous. At small family gatherings, it’s taken for granted that mothers and daughters need to do more, and at larger ones, there are always three tables: one for men, one for women, and one for children. Men discuss national affairs, politics, and history while drinking and smoking; women talk about domestic affairs while taking care of the children. In families who are not that well off, women often have to work and eat at the same time, sometimes without the chance to sit down at all, while men must be served first. When I went back to my hometown as a child, my grandma and aunts were always too busy to eat. Such a division of labor was taken for granted, which made me feel powerless—resistance only led to exhaustion.

Leaving and Becoming Self-Aware

JC: Did you feel that discomfort when you were still in Shandong or after you’d moved elsewhere and lived in different environments?

yy?: I felt an almost overwhelming sense of depression and pain when I was in middle school, but I didn’t know why. It wasn’t until I read “Unconditional Love” in an English newspaper that I suddenly realized the cause for it. I didn’t need to “know” anything to understand that bodily pain. It stemmed from the sense of disempowerment omnipresent in life: from home to school, as a young girl you were always under other people’s judgmental gaze and would even be scolded for the way you held a cup or sat. Slut-shaming and body-shaming were common in the environment in which I grew up. This invasive gaze and discipline had filled me with despair since middle school. The “love” in my parents’ mouth felt more like conditional mercy. I chose to go abroad because being gay was deemed “social death” in Shandong. I was kicked out by my family. It was in Australia that I realized for the first time that heathier power relations between minors and adults were possible.

JC: You studied fashion textiles during your undergraduate years in the UK and then pivoted toward the public sphere in your postgraduate studies. Why was that?

yy?: My grandma had a profound influence on me. She loved sewing but was not very skilled, which often led to absurdly creative pieces. She stitched horns onto dolls and dressed them with beads, very fairy-tale-like and full of imagination. Other members of my family often teased her for the large stitches in her quilts, but I was fascinated by her passion. I chose fashion design because I thought it could integrate collage and handwork. But the fashion industry is driven by commerce and utility, and experimental handwork is largely marginalized. At the end of my undergraduate years, my work grew increasingly performative, and my tutor encouraged me to consider fine arts. I applied to a performance art program at RCA [Royal College of Art] with my fashion portfolio, and it was there that I met Nigel Rolfe, whose encouragement helped me build confidence and experience a profound sense of freedom.

Another tutor who influenced me a lot was Mel Jordan. She was against Habermas’s theories, emphasized micropolitics, and reshaped knowledge relations through reading groups and collective sharing. At the time, some RCA campuses discriminated against Asian students. For instance, only Asian students were asked to show their student ID. My friends and I did interviews and created slogan-based posters, which drew attention. Mel actively supported me and encouraged me to try more public interventions of this kind. She helped me realize that knowledge is not just rational or academic but is intimately connected to lived experience. In one conversation, she stopped herself from overinterpreting my work, admitting that she shouldn’t speak on my behalf. The respect she showed me deeply moved me. She saw me as a creator with subjectivity rather than a “student” within a pedagogical hierarchy. Under her influence, I gradually shifted from performance art to public-sphere studies, engaging with anthropology, journalism, and politics and establishing a more socially engaged practice.

JC: How did you shift from the “public” to women’s labor?

yy?: For me, performance is not separated from the public sphere; hence the shift came naturally. Performance relies on bodily intuition and evokes memories through action. After a year of studying performance, I still loved it but felt confined. I longed for a more open media structure. In the meantime, when I spoke from my individual experience, I wasn’t seeking empathy. I believed that affective resonance between individuals could create a moment of micropolitical publicness. That’s why I shifted my focus to the “public sphere,” trying to find theoretical structures for such intuition and feeling, making it easier to dialogue with others.

I don’t think women’s labor is confined to the “private sphere.” Women’s conditions and struggles are universal and interwoven. The net formed by patriarchal capitalism precisely captures each and every woman. The public and the private are not binary.

The shift in my practice took place after I returned to China in 2019. I began working with everyday objects associated with motherhood. But what made me become truly aware of its significance were the recurring discussions about “women artists not wanting to be called women artists.” A director of an art institute once said: “Sometimes I see such a great work, and it wouldn’t ever occur to me that it was made by a woman artist.” The supposed “compliment” enraged me. It took for granted that men should be the default subject and once again positioned women as the object of the gaze. It is exactly because masculine forms of creation are regarded as “normative” that women artists have to explain themselves again and again.

Such inequality is ingrained and systemic. In this context, whatever response you make, women artists are forced to offer an explanation. I chose to speak publicly: I am a feminist artist. Since “feminism” has been stigmatized as killjoy, reckless, improper, and untimely, I wanted to embrace it and counter the prejudices through my work. To me, feminism is a method of making art and an aesthetic judgement, not a simplified label.

Breaking with the Family, Learning to Love

JC: Your practice often touches on the notion of “family.” I saw traces of myself in your upbringing as well. For instance, I also stayed at my teacher’s home for a while. I felt the sense of “drifting” at an early age and a sense of uncertainty toward the idea of “family.” I wonder if your experience has shaped your understanding of “family.”

yy?: My feminist awakening and my understanding of love both stem from the deep pain I feel from my family. Psychology might explain it through the lens of parental neglect and authoritarian parenting. But what I’m more concerned about is what sustains the relationships between people. When I was a child, I was often confused: What drew people close together, and what drove them apart? All About Love by bell hooks spoke directly to my confusion and taught me how to understand and articulate “love” in work and life. She points out that many caregivers provide material support and physical care, but that does not equate to love. Love is profoundly complex but has been reduced to a negative discourse by modernism. Consumerism and mainstream culture have also deepened that bias. She also writes about her elder sister, who was dismissed as “immature” for complaining about the lack of love. Such misunderstanding and shaming are in fact typical of the broader society.

Her writing inspires me to reflect: What constitutes family or relationships? I’ve been in different kinds of emotional relationships and gradually come to realize that romantic love alone is not enough to form a “family.” We often hope that intimacy can repair what our family of origin failed to give us, but neither knowledge nor compensation can truly mend that absence. The emotional needs that were unmet at critical moments because of the negligence of caregivers become a kind of loss produced by the convergence of a particular time, space, and interpersonal relationships. The love you need is a specific emotional force at a specific time and in a specific situation. If you didn’t receive it then, that absence will never be filled. I began to accept that it’s just bad luck, one unfortunate mishap after another. When I stopped trying to compensate for the past, parent myself, or be obsessed with the idea of establishing a “family of my own choice,” I started to understand: Once you have accumulated your own values, knowledge, and emotional framework, you can be self-sustaining. A “self-sustaining family” doesn’t rely on others or on multiple relations. Letting go of my fixation on “family” has allowed me to approach connection in a lighter and more open way.

From Utopia to Fatigue

JC: When we met in Rizhao, Shandong Province, in 2022, you were excited about attending a radical, left-wing feminist school. But you quit shortly after. How come?

yy?: The school was called DAI [Dutch Art Institute] and was known for its radical leftist and feminist stances. Initially, I was attracted by its utopian learning community. But once there, I found that behind this “collectivity” was a highly organized and oppressive social structure. To people like me who came from an East Asian collectivist background, the “white-left” romanticization of “de-gendering and de-identification” felt hypocritical and suffocating. Daily life was over-theorized: Even cooking became a locus of political correctness, and social interactions had been programmed into a “speed-dating” style of knowledge exchange. Within such a rigid framework, the learning space became chaotic, and the so-called collectivism lacked real agency. Eventually I chose to quit.

JC: After quitting the school, you wandered for a while, right?

yy?: During the pandemic, I had planned to return to China but couldn’t owing to my physical condition. Leaving Shanghai marked a psychological turning point for me. Many people left after lockdown. I was in a similar state of mind and left for Europe. But I soon began to feel a different type of fatigue: Eurocentrism and bureaucracy were just as depressing. I lived in a squat with a group of Middle Eastern artists in exile. The spatial compression caused by structural discrimination was, in essence, no different from the tension I had experienced in China. My short stay in Berlin further revealed to me how the surface of so-called freedom concealed deep and persistent problems.

In the European context, cultural appropriation, critiques of patriarchy, and debates among minority communities often end up in mutual policing and struggles over discursive power. It is very hard for new possibilities to open up in an atmosphere like this, which is prone to conceptual entanglements generated by an external gaze. Those who hold discursive power are not the ones deprived of it; rather, they have mastered the language of dispossession and use it to enhance their own branding. These discourses lack genuine energy and are merely reiterations of elite rhetoric.

My practice—especially the part concerning Chinese women’s conditions—cannot be geographically detached from its “site.” Being “weathered” by life is the true driving force behind my work. I don’t reject safety or intentionally look for hardship. But if everything goes too smoothly, we tend to lose empathy for those in crisis. When I went back to London, I spent more time reading. Unlike in many other European countries, where marginalized groups must often compete for limited resources, the cultural ecosystem in London feels more nuanced: Black queer bookstores and feminist bookstores focusing on labor and gender are integrated into everyday life. I hope my practice can become part of the everyday too, rather than being defined solely by anger and resistance.

The Granularity of Pain

JC: But eventually you left London?

yy?: The context and the way I work determined that I needed to come back. It’s not about where is better but about choosing. As an artist and feminist researcher, I need to build on a sense of “self-knowledge.” I have to be close to the real conditions to feel the granularity of pain in order to keep exploring.

JC: I also felt a sense of resistance while abroad. Distance creates a barrier to empathy. Only by being physically on-site can one measure the danger.

yy?: I agree. True danger deepens your understanding of others and softens your judgment of yourself. Support from overseas is important as it enables China’s voices to be heard by the world. But only by being physically present on the front could one have embodied experience. After the pandemic, many of those who stayed became more “down-to-earth” in their work and life.

JC: Some friends say artists in China fail to respond to the reality, and, by comparison, creators abroad are more straightforward.

yy?: I can understand why they say that. Indeed, many works are created by overseas artists—for example, the “chained lady” incident. But the difference is mainly methodological. Keeping a distance from events helps you to remain calm; while for the people who have lived through it, the reality is too heavy to digest. I feel many works are “emotionless”—they tell us “what’s happening” but fail to convey the complexity of reality. If we see creation as an outward penetration of life experience, something that has been digested and ruminated on, physical distance makes that process difficult.

It’s not those who experienced the events that failed to respond. They are constrained by reality, or their trauma is too overwhelming to be transformed. I feel that many people begin to turn to food, body, and the everyday . . . All these “non-conceptual” shifts are in themselves a kind of response. Instead of creating “political” works, they address the experience through lifestyle changes and a reorganization of life. It’s a response on the physical and emotional levels. Subtle as they are, these changes are equally profound.

JC: The other day we talked about Wang Tuo’s The Second Interrogation. I couldn’t help crying when I was watching it. Through the conversation between a cultural inspector and an artist, Wang revisits 1989 and reflects on the present. I could feel his anxiety and helplessness as a culture worker—as if someone were asking: What can you do in this historical moment? The direct confrontation with the reality deeply moved me. But I also wonder, Why does emotional weight sometimes weaken the evaluation of a work according to “artistic standards”? Are the standards themselves a bit “ungrounded”?

yy?: Do you feel the work isn’t handled with enough “precision,” or are you questioning the standards themselves?

JC: Both. There are technical criteria in place, yet I also question them. Perhaps it’s a problem with the field itself. Ruo Fan mentioned the term “New Sincerity” proposed by Yang Jiahui, which places an emphasis on the straightforward expression of emotions. But in the evaluation system of contemporary art, it is often regarded as immature for its lack of “transformation” or “sublimation.”

yy?: Have you read Returning to Reims by French philosopher Didier Eribon? Born into a working-class family, he grew up to become an intellectual. The book is a record of his return to his hometown to confront the coarse reality, revealing the rupture between memory and reality. His student Édouard Louis also writes novels about mothers, fathers, violence, alcoholism, and bullying. His wording is very impactful. In an interview, he said that, in the French literary tradition, writings charged with strong emotions were often deemed “not classy,” but he insisted on writing truthfully; otherwise, it would be a denial of life.

I do resonate with that. I grew up witnessing violence, collapse, and economic strain. It makes me care more about whether a work moves people and makes the invisible conditions seen, rather than whether it conforms with institutional standards. I didn’t come to art through academies. I was forced to go abroad because of my queer identity. It was then that I started my process of creation. Hence, my standards don’t come from the canon of art history. What matters to me is whether the work is sincere and touches the heartstrings.

As Louis said, political and social topics in literature were often considered “not literary”; but the intervention of social science and politics helped him understand chaotic emotions. They became a yardstick to guide him. I think it’s the same for art: the key lies in the willingness to face reality. If the standards for evaluating art forbid sincere tears, shouldn’t we re-examine such standards?

JC: Are such “standards” a subtle form of “misogyny”? Strong emotions are labeled “feminine” and not allowed as a result.

yy?: True. It’s an aesthetic preference that subconsciously defines what is “classy”. It rejects emotional intensity, regarding it as lowbrow. Such gendered norms are deeply ingrained.

Why create? And for Whom?

JC: You spent time living in different places after the pandemic and then returned to China. How did it influence your practice?

yy?: I didn’t work for six months after I returned. I could only try out small things. It was only recently that I rented the first studio of my life. To me, it’s a commitment. In the past, I was always juggling a job while making art, constantly caught up in trivial daily matters. When I finally found my own rhythm, my practice started to turn toward life itself. As to how to transform these experiences into work, I haven’t thought that through yet. The piece presented at Organhaus received a strong response from the audience, but during the creation process I barely got any affirmation. At that time, I was still in a combative state, trying to fight for rights through critique and identification. But now I am no longer in that state. I see it as feminism 3.0. What might the future look like when women are freed from the external gaze? My practice envisages a future without misogyny. Such a shift is not driven by anger but is rather a natural, slow process.

JC: Is it because of fatigue?

yy?: Sure, a very profound fatigue. Public discussions on feminism often lag behind in terms of both understanding and expectation, while the people who are genuinely engaged have long been cultivating a future “private plot” for women. Women are expanding into new territories of the imagination, especially in the realm of literature. While public discourses remain fixated on “confrontation,” some men have already begun to panic because women no longer respond to them—no more explanations, no more educating, and no more involvement in the rules they set. I’m also curious to see how this kind of new experience will surface in my work.