b.1998, China
they / them
cassyaostudio@gmail.com
lives and works at Brooklyn New York
ig @cass.yao
Statement
Cass Yao’s practice examines voluntary bodily modification as a way of rupturing 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 Yao’s work has always been a site of negotiation, stretched between internal pressure and external force, constantly restructured through touch, incision, mutation, and repair.
Central to their inquiry is the question: who decides what a body should become, and what remains in the residue of that becoming? Informed by theories of epigenetics, abjection, gender formation, and Foucault’s notion of the docile body, Yao investigates how bodies are inscribed by regimes of care and control—and how they might reconfigure those inscriptions through acts of resistance or reformation. They are particularly drawn to forms of bodily modification that blur the line between agency and compulsion - be it driven by medical necessity, desire, or social modulation.
Yao’s sculptures operate as anatomical proxies—biomorphic structures composed of silicone, raw silk, epoxies, and salvaged debris. Crafted with porous structure and viscous materiality, these works often appear in states of collapse or containment, recalling membranes, viscera, or embryonic folds. They evoke organisms caught mid-mutation or prosthetics at the threshold of utility, suggesting a temporality of healing, exhaustion, or stasis.
A recurring focus in Yao’s research is the idea of the maternal body as a metabolizing infrastructure. It unceasingly modifies itself with recursive care, transference and decay, conditioning corporeal regeneration in hemorrhage. The maternal is sensed through hormonal echoes, asymmetrical weight, and soft thresholds. In engaging this corporeal memory, Yao articulates sculpture as a space of unfinished transmission—where nurture and rupture, sustenance and depletion, are entangled within the process of becoming form.