The Café Royal Cultural Foundation NYC has awarded a 2024 Spring Visual Grant to Yiyao Tang for her upcoming installation “Faulting”

Yiyao Tang was born in Wenzhou, China, and now lives and works in New York. She received her BFA from Pratt Institute and her MA from Harvard University. Tang’s practice coalesces mediums of intervention, projection, and installation to explore how social and political systems are embedded within images and objects.

Using personal devices and inventive setups, she constructs and contests ideas on freedom, trauma, justice, otherness, and memory. Her setups behave twofold: both object and subject of her ideas, often leading to unpredictable outcomes themselves. More than just an archival account, Tang’s approach approximates archaeology in her ongoing process of uncovering evidence of our own contemporary artefacts, collective memories, and climactic traumas.

Her solo exhibitions include: Faulting, Gallery Vacancy, Shanghai, 2024; Mattering, theBlanc Gallery, New York, 2023; Precarious, Kirkland Gallery, Cambridge, 2022. She is the recipient of the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts Residency Program, Omaha, in 2024; and the Swatch Art Peace Hotel Artist Residency, Shanghai, 2023.

Her latest installation, "Faulting" explores the multifaceted nature of information and its disarmingly pervasive distribution in contemporary society through various material, linguistic, and corporeal registers. It metaphorically represents fractures caused by tensional forces in how information is subjected to political, social, and moral structures. The installation comprises coconut coir bricks from five countries, arranged in grids, facilitating ecological cycles while metaphorically upholding human institutions. The bricks feature printed front-page news from mainstream publishers in five permanent UN member countries. Surveillance cameras and monitors observe and transmit visitor activity through machine intelligence, inspecting the malleability of truth. In the outdoor iteration, the rain will dissolve the printed news, symbolizing the impermanence of constructed "truths," while embedded seeds will sprout, representing resilience and new growth emerging from the ruins of artificial realities.