b.1998, Nanjing, China
they / them
Email / cassyaostudio@gmail.com
Insta / @cass.yao↵
:: Statement
Cass Yao's practice treats the body as a mass in continuous transformation—shaped by injury, desire, care, and internal pressure, never arriving at a stable form. Medical surgery, hormona intervention, AI-generated anatomical imagery, cross-species grafting: these interventions enter the body and psyche, leaving traces and questions behind. In an era when bodily images can be generated infinitely and anatomy itself algorithmically inferred, who holds the authority to interpret the body becomes an urgent question. The body does not return to its original state after intervention; it internalizes trauma, persisting through deformation, folding, and leakage. Anatomy, as a modern Western operative language, determines where the body may be cut, repaired, or corrected, granting legitimacy to certain incisions while suppressing others, stratifying the body, distributing power, encoding a form across cultures in which we often cannot locate ourselves.
Yao searches the gaps in this language for another anatomy: a bodily knowledge grown from within. They are drawn especially to holes and cavities—openings that never fully close. In anatomy, the hole is functional; in older imaginaries, it is a threshold for exchange with the outside world, a passage for the soul, the place where the boundary is thinnest. In Yao's work, the cavity holds the possibility of internal pressure reorganizing itself; perforation lets matter and meaning flow together. Their sculptures hover between the animate and the inanimate — compressed, stretched, suspended structures that hold the body in a perpetual critical state, at once forming and collapsing. Psychological and physiological trauma translate directly into form: deformation, protrusion, folding, the body's topology described under pressure. Silicone, epoxy clay, and resin-soaked fabric soften, leak, and sag over time, recording damage as an ongoing process. Fragility and resilience contend within the same volume, the body endlessly damaged, mended, and still spilling beyond containment.