Introduction

Yao Qingmei’s practice traverses the boundary between performance, its archives 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 China) currently lives and works in Wenzhou and Paris. She graduated from Villa Arson National Art School in France in 2013 and was awarded the Prix spécial du Jury at the 59th Salon de Montrouge in 2014. In 2017, she was awarded the «Young Chinese Artist of the Year» prize in China and was selected in 2018 for the Jeune Création. In 2022, she received AIC support from the DRAC d’Île-de-France and is the recipient of the Asian Cultural Council’s New York Fellowship in 2023.

Her work has entered public collections and private foundations including the Fond Municipal d’Art Contemporain de Paris, the Direction Générale des Affaires Culturelles de la Ville de Marseille, the Guangdong Art Museum, the Taikang Art Museum in Beijing and the Kadist Art Foundation in San Francisco. She has been exhibited at Palais de Tokyo in Paris (2014), Badischer-Kunstverein (2015) in Germany, Ullens of Centre Contemporary Art in Beijing (2017), Para Site in Hong Kong (2019), the Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art in Israel (2018), Whitechapel Gallery (2020), and West Bund Museum in Shanghai in collaboration with Centre Pompidou (2023). His performances have been shown at the Haus der Kunst Museum in Munich and the Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature in Paris.