Zhiyuan Yang’s practice examines the entanglement of personal histories and collective memory within broader political and economic systems. Through conceptual strategies that span moving image, installation, photography, and text, she investigates how experiences of loss—whether intimate or societal—reflect the failures and contradictions of modernization, institutional authority, and global power structures.

 

Working with fragmentation, re-staging, and narrative disruption, Yang blurs the boundaries between fact and fiction to question how identity, memory, and belonging are constructed. Her practice often intervenes in existing frameworks—familial, political, or artistic—to expose the mechanisms of control and exclusion that shape lived experience. By revealing the limits of dominant narratives and institutional systems, she opens up spaces to reimagine collective forms of resistance, care, and alternative ways of being.