Yang Chi-Chuan is a Taiwanese artist based in Taipei whose work explores the intimate psychological relationships between people and places, objects and events. She employs a delicate expression in her sculptures and sound installations, which often feature personified objects. Drawing on personal experiences and memories, Yang invites viewers on an intimate narrative journey that offers probing questions about our surroundings.
Yang’s commissioned work for the Taipei Biennial 2023, Your Tears Remind Me to Cry, is a sound installation that meditates on struggles with anxiety and fear. The work comprises several sets of ceramic sculptures as well as sound elements. Audio narration encapsulates the artist’s own experiences, as well as her observations about friends and family. Voices of the artist and her friends seem to be in conversation, yet they could also be speaking to themselves. Accompanied by the sound of a piano, these voices recount fears of nightmares. The gentle melody of the piano and the uneasy content of the conversation creates a mixed feeling, combining conflict with soothing comfort.
Some of the ceramic sculptures are inspired by cells, bacteria, and insects, evoking the microorganisms with which we coexist in our living environment. Others reflect Yang’s interpretation or imagination of what “fear” would look like if it had a physical form. A constellation of these ceramic sculptures is suspended from the ceiling like sets of wind chimes, swirling in the exhibition space and producing a clapping sound when the pieces collide.
Yang’s work retains a kind of sharpness within its softness. Beneath the seemingly sweet surface of her sculptures is a microscopic examination of the experience of inhabiting fear. Yang foregrounds uneasy contradictions as she attempts to find a condition for survival within the ordinary.
