Sinuous slopes, undulating like piles of geological flesh, valleys of time and erosion, covered with organic detritus, and the disharmony of these bodies raising in turn growths and infections, becoming, with time, scars.
Wool felt, beads, paper pulp, yarn, textile fabric, cotton thread are the material language Ziyi Yan (b. 2001) uses to ossify the forces of resistance and struggle that define life’s bloody progress. Such is What the Body Records (2025), the artist’s most complete and unapologetic layering of human suffering, a portrait as subjectively meaningful as it is objectively inevitable. Just as one can read a topographical map as a history of the earth’s pressures, wounds and recovery, so the body is a map of our own narrative. We might feel lost, but we walk the paths carved out of the maps we have spent our lives charting.
Born in Shandong, China; the paths of Yan’s life find her in Glasgow, where she completed a Master of Design in Communication Design (2023 to 2025). And communication is key here. Communication design is a training in legibility: how to order information for a reader, how a sign carries its meaning, how to make messages land.
Yan turns that discipline inward, building organisms that arrive structured like systems waiting to be read, all branching channels, clustered nodes and circulating colour, the apparatus of a diagram, then withholding the key that would decode them. The training accounts for both halves of the work, the impulse to give feeling a structure and the discovery that feeling resists it. Importantly, she’s savvy enough to recognise that art flourishes where language fails and falls silent. She wants us to close the emotional distance that life describes, sketched in language but conveyed by the visual motifs of her sculptures and paintings.
In her ambitious work What the Body Records the metaphor turns literal. A pale, chalky boulder of felt and paper pulp sits on bare soil, its slopes erupting in pink and red: felted nodules, nipple-like buds, beaded clusters that read as barnacles, coral or cell colonies, with red threads running down the rock like rivulets of blood. The work grows from Yan’s noticing of bodies under pressure, the cracked hands of construction workers, the marks of illness on a relative’s skin, and it casts the stone as a second body that erodes and records in turn. Yet the same care that makes the piece beautiful is where the questioning begins: suffering here arrives in the materials of adornment, embroidery and beadwork, the lexicon of the ephemeral keepsakes elevated. The lesions are lovely. Whether that loveliness honours the labouring body it cites or quietly prettifies it into something collectible is a question the object leaves open, and much of its social charge lives in the caption rather than the felt. Strip the statement away and the viewer might too often meets decorative geology never noticing the pain.
It’s in her paintings that Yan uses the indeterminacy of the colour experience as a symbolic language to create an immanent experience. Her recent piece In Slow Currents (2026) shows a curled organic shape, like a nestled cat or a discarded colon, a chthonic form in a primordial pool of warm, stagnant nostalgia. The colours remind us of the baby-blue optimism of a room painted by an expectant mother, the tendrils and wisps, sighs of foreboding and hope. Rendered in the hyper-manual material of gouache, coloured pencil and pastel, the tactile energy of the piece feels like the artist has just stepped away from the easel. Portentous and electric, it awaits. It feels tight, claustrophobic, but the shape is somehow alive, a movement glimpsed from the corner of the eye. A promise and a threat.
It is tempting, faced with all this soft tissue, to start naming ancestors. The fibre and the leakage recall Eva Hesse, whose Hang Up (1966) let a single cord escape an empty frame and grope out into the room (Hesse 1966); the stitched, caged body recalls Louise Bourgeois and her Cells. The lean toward speculative biology reminds us of the co-evolutionary thought of Donna Haraway, who holds that we are made with, never made alone (Haraway 2016). In 1966, Lucy Lippard described the potential for sculpture to be soft and off-centre as eccentric abstraction (Lippard 1966), and the term fits Yan as snugly as it fits a dozen others. And while these artistic cousins may be only passing relations, these constellations of names do mark the lineage her work brushes against, the long insistence that pulp and thread and seepage carry the charge we once reserved for bronze.
Yan’s work has the admirable quality of danger. It’s not quite safe. Not quite palatable, though it presents itself in agreeable tones. It’s a mystery that erodes with time and a parallel process to those we experience in daily lives. Where the artist will take these impulses is unknown yet pieces like In Slow Currents and What the Body Records, mark an ambition towards greater conceptual works that play with the perception and embodiment of hard lives. Time and space are not only curved but accumulating, an accretion of knowledge whose edges bleed forward towards a future we indubitably follow.
Bibliography
Haraway D 2016, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, Duke University Press, Durham.
Hesse E 1966, Hang Up, Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago.
Lippard L 1966, ‘Eccentric abstraction’, Art International, and exhibition, Fischbach Gallery, New York.
Exhibitions
Upcoming exhibitions
Galleri Thomassen, ‘High Tide Low Flux’, Gothenburg, Sweden, Aug 2026
Circular ArtSpace, ‘2026 Community Art Exhibition’, Bristol, UK, Jun 2026
Selected exhibitions
MONU Curates x Artlink, ‘Rebirth’, London, UK, May 2026
Detmold Designwoche, ‘Less’, Detmold, Germany, May 2026
The Coningsby Gallery, ‘Traces, Echoes, Residue’, London, UK, Apr 2026
Arrival Gallery, ‘Open Theme’, Madrid, Spain, Apr 2026
Isolart Gallery, ‘Generative Metamorphosis’, Florence, Italy, Jan 2026
Qloud Collective, ‘Dear Madeleine’, London, UK, Dec 2025
Studiohome Awareness, ‘Soft Architecture’, Milan, Italy, Dec 2025
Frevd, ‘Things Left Unsaid’, London, UK, Sep 2025
Glasgow School of Art, ‘WIP Show’, Glasgow, UK, Dec 2024
Selected awards
6th Shandong Provincial Collegiate Basic Skills Competition in Art and Design, ‘Best Dream’ | First Prize | Apr 2023
Shandong University Art and Design Competition, selected for the San Jose International Art and Design Festival | Excellence Award | 2022
Global College Student Industrial Design Competition, ‘Shoelace Brush’ | Third Prize | Aug 2020
Selected media
Associazione Nomya APS, ‘Generative Metamorphosis’, international exhibition | 2025
Artdaily, ‘Whispers in a Loud City: Things Left Unsaid’ | 2025
Young Ecological Artist, ‘Things Left Unsaid: A Silence that Matters’ | 2025
Images courtesy of the artist © Ziyi Yan. This article is part of a supported series by emerging artists including Ziyi Yan. All unattributed photography by Ziyi Yan.
Ex-London based reader of art and culture. LSE Masters Graduate. Arts and Culture writer since 1995 for Future Publishing, Conde Nast, Wig Magazine and Oyster. Specialist subjects include; media, philosophy, cultural aesthetics, contemporary art and French wine. When not searching for road-worn copies of eighteenth-century travelogues he can be found loitering in the inspirational uplands of art galleries throughout Europe.
