Yao Qingmei

Yao Qingmei’s practice traverses the boundary between performance and its site, frequently enacting intervention in public space to perturb the parameters of its reality and surroundings. Her art is deep-rooted in a critical reflection into the formulation of political and social questions, exploring how symbolic gestures gain or lose power through forms of appropriation and displacement.

Here, humor plays an important role in her work, using the poetics of comedy to expose the absurdity of a particular issue. Offering different methods of resistance, her theatrical performances and interventions find their form in an area overlapping burlesque traditions of satire and parody, which combine with framing devices influenced by theatre sets and costume, pedagogical lectures, the dialectic between image and, text, choreography inspired by modern dance. Yao Qingmei (b.1982, Zhejiang) currently lives and works in Wenzhou and Paris. She achieved DNSEP with honors from Villa Arson, Nice, France in 2013, and was awarded the winner of Prix spécial du jury at the 59th Salon de Montrouge in 2014 in France, the Prize “Young Chinese Artist of the Year”in 2017 in China, the 68th Prix Jeune Création of Paris in 2018 and Asian Cultural Council New York Fellowship in 2022.

  • Fall 2023 MR@Judson Artist
image of Yao Qingmei balancing in a wide squat on a railing with their hands reaching down on a pole. They are in all black with floral patterned shoes and a vest. Behind them, is a red panel wall, they look directly to the camera.
ID: image of Yao Qingmei balancing in a wide squat on a railing with their hands reaching down on a pole. They are in all black with floral patterned shoes and a vest. Behind them, is a red panel wall, they look directly to the camera.