b.1998, China
they / them
Email / cassyaostudio@gmail.com
IG / @cass.yao
Statement
My practice examines the body as a volume where injury is continuously produced and extended. I am concerned with how bodies, in a psycho-physical sense, are modified through repeated wounding—by anatomical classification, medical intervention, and practices of care. My works explore how these external injuries are internalized and continued by the body itself, and how it persists through ongoing damage and repair.
The science of anatomy functions in my work as a system that authorizes injury. Anatomical and medical diagrams determine where the body can be cut, preserved, studied, or mended. These diagrams establish a hierarchy of organs, their functions, and failures, defining what wounds are necessary and which forms of damage are acceptable, alienated to oneself or not. I translate this logic into sculptural forms that compress, suspend, and segment the body.
While Anatomical order organizes injury and provides the visceral representation, I use the theory and framework of topology to envision the metaphysics of such anatomy and how damage and psycho-physical trauma is internalized into singularities in the body. Drawing from topology, in which form is essentiated by the number of holes it contains, I understand each hole as an embedded rupture within the body; upon opening a hole it creates a new channel that restructures how bodily matter holds together and turns itself inside-out. Curvature, invagination, viscosity, and porosity recur throughout my work, forming toplogically changing structures that register pressure and erosion with porosity.
Within this framework, bodily modification is visualized as a repeating operation, precise yet erroneous. The body, already segmented by anatomical logic and morphed through topological alteration, continues injury through acts that resemble maintenance. Materials such as silicone, epoxy-soaked textiles, and composite skins register this process through their texture and behavior. Upon the wound that conditioned the body, what remains is an introverted structure that endures through pluralizing damage and always renews amidst the inheritance of trauma.