b.1998, China
they / them
Email / cassyaostudio@gmail.com
IG / @cass.yao
Statement
Cass Yao’s practice examines the voluntary act of bodily modification and its intervention to the assumed coherence of the body. Their work approaches corporeal identity as a contingent morphology shaped by psycho-physical trauma, desire, and inheritance. The body, in their work, is a responsive structure—stretched between internal pressure and external force, continually reshaped through touch, incision, mutation, and repair.
Who decides what a body should become, and what remains in the residue of that becoming? Informed by theories of epigenetics, abjection, gender formation, Yao investigates how bodies are inscribed by regimes of care and control, and how they reconfigure those inscriptions through acts of deformation. They are particularly drawn to bodily modifications that blur the line between agency and compulsion, whether driven by medical necessity, desire, or social imposition.
Yao’s sculptures imagine anatomical blueprints composed of silicone, raw silk, epoxy, and salvaged debris. Crafted with porous form and viscous materiality, these works appear in states of collapse or containment, recalling membranes, viscera, or embryonic folds. They evoke organisms caught mid-mutation or prosthetics no longer bound to utility, embodying a temporality of healing, exhaustion, or stasis.
A recurring focus is the maternal body as a generative system of decay and repair. It unceasingly modifies itself with recursive care, transference and decay, conditioning corporeal regeneration in hemorrhage and erosion. Within this framework, sculpture becomes a space of unfinished transmission, where nurture and rupture, sustenance and depletion, intertwine to form new anatomies.