Interview
Lost at Home: Curator Jenny Chen interviews the artist yy?
Lost at Home: Conversations with Returnee Cultural Practitioners uncovers how cultural practitioners who return to China after years abroad navigate the tension between belonging and estrangement, reshaping identity and institutional realities along the way. Part of the Goethe-Institut’s East and Central Asia project Solitude: Loneliness & Freedom—this interview series traces their strategies for sustaining cultural freedom in a rapidly shifting China, opening new space to rethink ‘roots’ and the future of creative work. In the third part Curator Jenny Chen interviews the artist yy?.
yy? was born in 1993 in Shandong, China, and grew up there. Her artistic practice focuses on class mobility, family dilemmas, women’s social movements, poetry and political slogans, as well as on the subjective narratives of Chinese women within the context of global patriarchal capitalism. Her transmedia projects involve social practices, performance, installations, textiles and textual composition. She has recently developed a passion for culinary practices as well as collaborating with companion animals to construct and explore new ways of ordering everyday life.
yy?: I was born in a community built around a 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 independence from an early age, starting in elementary school, moving between the homes of relatives and friends of the family. [...] This somewhat atypical experience of being a “left-behind” child gave me a visceral understanding of family, home and the role of patriarchy in the household.
The huge medical expenses for my mom’s treatment forced my dad to quit the state-owned company he was working for and we moved to a coastal city with a privately owned steel mill. The switch from public- to private-sector jobs epitomized the changes many working-class families in the north were going through back then. [...] Workers and cadres lived on different floors of the same building. Beneath the surface uniformity there was a clear sense of class differences.
I lived there until I was fourteen or fifteen, then decided to finish high school in Australia. After that I moved to the UK to study for my bachelor’s and master’s degrees. From the moment I went abroad, I was drawn – almost unconsciously – to artistic creation.
JC: You said you never felt much of an impulse to go home. Why not?
yy?: There’s a joke that’s gone viral lately on social media about “women in Shandong not being allowed to eat at the table”. You see gender segregation in almost every sphere of life. [...] In not very well-off families, men are served first and women often have to eat standing up while they’re still slaving away in the kitchen. When I went back to my hometown as a child, my grandma and aunts were always too busy to sit down for a meal. This division of labor was taken for granted, which made me feel powerless: resistance to the status quo was a fruitless and exhausting waste of breath.
yy?: I felt an almost overwhelming sense of depression and even physical pain when I was in middle school, though I didn’t know why. [...] It wasn’t hard to identify the source of that pain. It stemmed from an omnipresent sense of disempowerment: whether at home or at school, as a young girl you were constantly subjected to the watchful and judgmental gaze of others. [...] I chose to go abroad because being gay was deemed a “capital crime” in Shandong. My family actually kicked me out. It wasn’t till I got to Australia that I realized that heathier power relations between young people and adults are actually possible.
JC: You studied fashion design in college in the UK, and then shifted toward the public sphere in your graduate studies. Why was that?
yy?: My grandma had a profound influence on me. She loved sewing but was not very skilled, which often gave rise to absurdly creative garments. [...] Other members of my family would tease her about the wide stitches on her quilts, but I was fascinated by her passion. I chose fashion design because I thought it was a way of combining collage and handicrafts {or does she mean more specifically needlework?}. But the fashion industry is driven by commerce and utility, while experimental handicrafts {oder needlework?} are for the most part marginalized. So, towards the end of my undergraduate years, my work grew increasingly performative. [...]
One tutor who also influenced me a lot was Mel Jordan. She was against Habermas’s theories and espoused micropolitics in the form of reading groups, collective work and sharing. [...] She helped me see that knowledge is not only rational or academic, but intimately connected to lived experience. In one conversation we had, she stopped herself from over-interpreting my work, admitting that she shouldn’t speak for me. I was deeply moved by the respect she showed me in making such an admission. She saw me as a creative artist with a subjective practice rather than as a “student” in a pedagogical hierarchy.
JC: How did you shift from the “public” sphere to women’s labor?
yy?: [...] I don’t think women’s labor is confined to the “private” sphere. The conditions and struggles women contend with are universal and interconnected. Every woman gets caught up in the net of patriarchal capitalism. The public and the private are not strictly separate spheres.
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 really hit me was the recurring public discussion about “women artists not wanting to be called women artists”. [...] It’s precisely because male forms of creation are deemed “normative” that women artists are always compelled to justify themselves.
I chose to speak out: I’m a feminist artist. Since “feminism” has been stigmatized as killjoy, reckless, improper and untimely, I wanted to embrace it and counter anti-feminist prejudice through my work. To me, feminism is a method of making art and an aesthetic judgement, not a reductionist label.
yy?: My feminist awakening and my understanding of love both stem from the deep pain my family has caused me. [...] When I was a child, I was often confused: What made people close – and what drove them apart? All About Love by bell hooks spoke directly to my confusion and taught me to how to understand and articulate “love” in my work and my life. [...]
Her writing makes me reflect: What constitutes a family – or a relationship? I’ve been in different kinds of emotional relationships and have gradually come to realize that romantic love alone is not enough to form a “family”. We often hope that intimacy can provide what our own families failed to give us, but no knowledge or compensation can truly make up for that absence. [...] I’m beginning to accept that it was just bad luck, one misfortune after another. When I stopped trying to compensate for the past, to parent myself, and stopped obsessing with the idea of building a family “of my own volition”, I began to understand that once you’ve formed your own values and emotional framework, and once you’ve amassed the knowledge you need, you can be self-sustaining. A “self-sustaining” family” doesn’t rely on others or on multiple relationships.
yy?: The school was called DAI and known for its radical left-wing and feminist stances. I was initially attracted to its utopian learning community. But once I got there, I found that behind that “community” was a highly organized and oppressive social structure. To those of us coming from an East Asian collectivist background, the “white left’s” romanticization of “de-gendering and de-identification” felt hypocritical and suffocating. [...]
JC: After leaving the school, you wandered around for a while, right?
yy?: [...] Many people left after the lockdown. I was in a similar mindset and left for Europe. But soon I began to feel a different type of fatigue: Eurocentrism and bureaucracy were just as depressing. [...] My short stay in Berlin drove home to me the profound and persistent problems under the surface of so-called “freedom”.
In the European context, cultural appropriation, critiques of patriarchy and debates between minority communities often devolve into mutual policing and struggles for discursive power. [...] Those who hold that power are the ones who’ve mastered the language of dispossession and use it to enhance their own branding.
My practice – especially the part concerning women’s issues in China – is geographically situated. I have been “seasoned” by real life experience, which is the driving force behind my work. [...] I have to be close to the real conditions on the ground to feel the granularity of people’s pain and to keep exploring.
JC: Some say artists in China fail to respond to the realities there, while artists abroad are more straightforward.
yy?: [...] Keeping your distance from what’s going on around you helps you keep calm, but for those who’ve been through it, the reality is too hard to process. I feel many works are emotionless: they tell us what’s “happening”, but fail to convey the complexity of reality. [...] Instead of creating “political” works, some artists come up with responses on a physical or emotional level. They’re as subtle as they are profound.
JC: [...] I also wonder: Why does emotional weight sometimes detract from a work of art’s value assessed according to “artistic standards”? Are the standards themselves a bit “ungrounded”?
yy?: Do you feel the works aren’t handled with enough “precision”, or are you questioning the standards themselves?
JC: Both. On the one hand, there’re technical criteria. And on the other, I’m also questioning these criteria. [...]
yy?: Have you read Returning to Reims by the French philosopher Didier Eribon? [...] His student Édouard Louis also writes novels about mothers and fathers, alcoholism, violence and bullying. [...] Louis observes that political and social issues in literature are often considered “unliterary”. But the social and political sciences help him understand chaotic emotions. I think it’s the same for art: the key is a willingness to face reality. If the critical standards of art forbid sincere tears, shouldn’t we reexamine those standards?
yy?: [...] I recently rented a studio for the first time in my life. To me, that’s a commitment. I used to be always juggling a day job, constantly caught up in trivial daily matters, with making art on the side. When I finally found my stride, my practice began turning towards life itself. [...] The piece presented at Organhaus [in Chongqing] got quite a powerful response from the audience, but during the creative process I barely got any encouragement. At that time I was still in a combative state of mind, trying to fight for rights by means of critiques and identification. But I’m not in that state anymore. I see it as Feminism 3.0. What might the future look like when women are freed from the patriarchal gaze? My practice envisages a future without misogyny. A seismic shift driven not by anger, but by a slow natural process.
JC: Is it because of fatigue?
yy?: Yes, a profound fatigue. Public discussions of feminism often lag behind artistic expressions thereof in terms of both comprehension and expectations, while truly committed feminists have long been cultivating a “private future scenario” for women. Women are charting new territories of the imagination especially in the realm of literature. While public discourse remains fixated on “confrontation”, some men have already begun to panic because women no longer respond to them: no more explanations, no more attempts by women to educate men, no more following the rules that men set. I’m also curious to see how such new developments will manifest in my work.
Rough childhood
Jenny Chen (JC): Can you tell us a little about your upbringing and education?yy?: I was born in a community built around a 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 independence from an early age, starting in elementary school, moving between the homes of relatives and friends of the family. [...] This somewhat atypical experience of being a “left-behind” child gave me a visceral understanding of family, home and the role of patriarchy in the household.
The huge medical expenses for my mom’s treatment forced my dad to quit the state-owned company he was working for and we moved to a coastal city with a privately owned steel mill. The switch from public- to private-sector jobs epitomized the changes many working-class families in the north were going through back then. [...] Workers and cadres lived on different floors of the same building. Beneath the surface uniformity there was a clear sense of class differences.
I lived there until I was fourteen or fifteen, then decided to finish high school in Australia. After that I moved to the UK to study for my bachelor’s and master’s degrees. From the moment I went abroad, I was drawn – almost unconsciously – to artistic creation.
JC: You said you never felt much of an impulse to go home. Why not?
yy?: There’s a joke that’s gone viral lately on social media about “women in Shandong not being allowed to eat at the table”. You see gender segregation in almost every sphere of life. [...] In not very well-off families, men are served first and women often have to eat standing up while they’re still slaving away in the kitchen. When I went back to my hometown as a child, my grandma and aunts were always too busy to sit down for a meal. This division of labor was taken for granted, which made me feel powerless: resistance to the status quo was a fruitless and exhausting waste of breath.
Leaving home and gaining self-awareness
JC: Did you feel that unease while still in Shandong or only after moving away?yy?: I felt an almost overwhelming sense of depression and even physical pain when I was in middle school, though I didn’t know why. [...] It wasn’t hard to identify the source of that pain. It stemmed from an omnipresent sense of disempowerment: whether at home or at school, as a young girl you were constantly subjected to the watchful and judgmental gaze of others. [...] I chose to go abroad because being gay was deemed a “capital crime” in Shandong. My family actually kicked me out. It wasn’t till I got to Australia that I realized that heathier power relations between young people and adults are actually possible.
JC: You studied fashion design in college in the UK, and then shifted toward the public sphere in your graduate studies. Why was that?
yy?: My grandma had a profound influence on me. She loved sewing but was not very skilled, which often gave rise to absurdly creative garments. [...] Other members of my family would tease her about the wide stitches on her quilts, but I was fascinated by her passion. I chose fashion design because I thought it was a way of combining collage and handicrafts {or does she mean more specifically needlework?}. But the fashion industry is driven by commerce and utility, while experimental handicrafts {oder needlework?} are for the most part marginalized. So, towards the end of my undergraduate years, my work grew increasingly performative. [...]
One tutor who also influenced me a lot was Mel Jordan. She was against Habermas’s theories and espoused micropolitics in the form of reading groups, collective work and sharing. [...] She helped me see that knowledge is not only rational or academic, but intimately connected to lived experience. In one conversation we had, she stopped herself from over-interpreting my work, admitting that she shouldn’t speak for me. I was deeply moved by the respect she showed me in making such an admission. She saw me as a creative artist with a subjective practice rather than as a “student” in a pedagogical hierarchy.
JC: How did you shift from the “public” sphere to women’s labor?
yy?: [...] I don’t think women’s labor is confined to the “private” sphere. The conditions and struggles women contend with are universal and interconnected. Every woman gets caught up in the net of patriarchal capitalism. The public and the private are not strictly separate spheres.
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 really hit me was the recurring public discussion about “women artists not wanting to be called women artists”. [...] It’s precisely because male forms of creation are deemed “normative” that women artists are always compelled to justify themselves.
I chose to speak out: I’m a feminist artist. Since “feminism” has been stigmatized as killjoy, reckless, improper and untimely, I wanted to embrace it and counter anti-feminist prejudice through my work. To me, feminism is a method of making art and an aesthetic judgement, not a reductionist label.
Breaking with family, learning to love
JC: Your practice often touches on 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 my family has caused me. [...] When I was a child, I was often confused: What made people close – and what drove them apart? All About Love by bell hooks spoke directly to my confusion and taught me to how to understand and articulate “love” in my work and my life. [...]
Her writing makes me reflect: What constitutes a family – or a relationship? I’ve been in different kinds of emotional relationships and have gradually come to realize that romantic love alone is not enough to form a “family”. We often hope that intimacy can provide what our own families failed to give us, but no knowledge or compensation can truly make up for that absence. [...] I’m beginning to accept that it was just bad luck, one misfortune after another. When I stopped trying to compensate for the past, to parent myself, and stopped obsessing with the idea of building a family “of my own volition”, I began to understand that once you’ve formed your own values and emotional framework, and once you’ve amassed the knowledge you need, you can be self-sustaining. A “self-sustaining” family” doesn’t rely on others or on multiple relationships.
From utopia to fatigue
JC: When we met in Rizhao [in Shandong Province] in 2022, you were excited about attending a radical left-wing feminist school. But you dropped out shortly after that. Why?yy?: The school was called DAI and known for its radical left-wing and feminist stances. I was initially attracted to its utopian learning community. But once I got there, I found that behind that “community” was a highly organized and oppressive social structure. To those of us coming from an East Asian collectivist background, the “white left’s” romanticization of “de-gendering and de-identification” felt hypocritical and suffocating. [...]
JC: After leaving the school, you wandered around for a while, right?
yy?: [...] Many people left after the lockdown. I was in a similar mindset and left for Europe. But soon I began to feel a different type of fatigue: Eurocentrism and bureaucracy were just as depressing. [...] My short stay in Berlin drove home to me the profound and persistent problems under the surface of so-called “freedom”.
In the European context, cultural appropriation, critiques of patriarchy and debates between minority communities often devolve into mutual policing and struggles for discursive power. [...] Those who hold that power are the ones who’ve mastered the language of dispossession and use it to enhance their own branding.
My practice – especially the part concerning women’s issues in China – is geographically situated. I have been “seasoned” by real life experience, which is the driving force behind my work. [...] I have to be close to the real conditions on the ground to feel the granularity of people’s pain and to keep exploring.
JC: Some say artists in China fail to respond to the realities there, while artists abroad are more straightforward.
yy?: [...] Keeping your distance from what’s going on around you helps you keep calm, but for those who’ve been through it, the reality is too hard to process. I feel many works are emotionless: they tell us what’s “happening”, but fail to convey the complexity of reality. [...] Instead of creating “political” works, some artists come up with responses on a physical or emotional level. They’re as subtle as they are profound.
JC: [...] I also wonder: Why does emotional weight sometimes detract from a work of art’s value assessed according to “artistic standards”? Are the standards themselves a bit “ungrounded”?
yy?: Do you feel the works aren’t handled with enough “precision”, or are you questioning the standards themselves?
JC: Both. On the one hand, there’re technical criteria. And on the other, I’m also questioning these criteria. [...]
yy?: Have you read Returning to Reims by the French philosopher Didier Eribon? [...] His student Édouard Louis also writes novels about mothers and fathers, alcoholism, violence and bullying. [...] Louis observes that political and social issues in literature are often considered “unliterary”. But the social and political sciences help him understand chaotic emotions. I think it’s the same for art: the key is a willingness to face reality. If the critical standards of art forbid sincere tears, shouldn’t we reexamine those standards?
Why create? For whom?
JC: You spent time living in different places after the pandemic and then returned to China. How did that influence your practice?yy?: [...] I recently rented a studio for the first time in my life. To me, that’s a commitment. I used to be always juggling a day job, constantly caught up in trivial daily matters, with making art on the side. When I finally found my stride, my practice began turning towards life itself. [...] The piece presented at Organhaus [in Chongqing] got quite a powerful response from the audience, but during the creative process I barely got any encouragement. At that time I was still in a combative state of mind, trying to fight for rights by means of critiques and identification. But I’m not in that state anymore. I see it as Feminism 3.0. What might the future look like when women are freed from the patriarchal gaze? My practice envisages a future without misogyny. A seismic shift driven not by anger, but by a slow natural process.
JC: Is it because of fatigue?
yy?: Yes, a profound fatigue. Public discussions of feminism often lag behind artistic expressions thereof in terms of both comprehension and expectations, while truly committed feminists have long been cultivating a “private future scenario” for women. Women are charting new territories of the imagination especially in the realm of literature. While public discourse remains fixated on “confrontation”, some men have already begun to panic because women no longer respond to them: no more explanations, no more attempts by women to educate men, no more following the rules that men set. I’m also curious to see how such new developments will manifest in my work.