Telle Yang

About

Telle Yang’s practice is multimedia. Through installation, sculpture, painting, writing and moving image, she explores issues around the climate crisis, with a mixture use of natural and artificial elements to create a surreal world. She usually uses reflective materials for presenting, not only to show hidden parts of the works, but also to create connections among various parts, audiences, and herself. Yang also pays attention to time, space and audience participation. When she exhibited her work in a window space, the mirrors she used brought outside views in, connecting the interior with the exterior to form a sense of openness and infinity, freedom and hope, and endless possibilities through dynamic visual dialogues.

Working in mixed media allows Yang to explore different materials and techniques. The combination enables the works to interact with audiences from multiple dimensions, enhancing the expression and infection of diversity and complexity of lives intertwined to show the inseparable connection of parasitism and symbiosis. She tries to show her work in concert with uncertainty, such as the change of weather and natural light, to enhance the dynamics and include audiences’ shadows be part of the work. Thinking through making, and making things happen. Yang never had a complete final design in her head before she started the process of making. She loves the surprises, even accidents the organic results brought her, which help her push her practice to develop her work further. These are just like the ideas she is dealing with.

Bringing the question of what if our body becomes a parasitic place for various living forms, the physical body will just be a transitional interface moving through mutually to leave certain forms to stay within us and coexist with us, Yang’s research focuses on anthropomorphism, anthropocentrism, metamorphosis, and investigate the reconsideration of ecological interactions under fungal ecologies and the idea of cohabitation and collaborative survival between humans and nonhumans. She is influenced by the ‘Camille Stories’ in the theorist Donna Haraway’s Staying with the Trouble which makes changes to the way of relations between humans and nonhumans on a damaged earth, and the biologist Merlin Sheldrake’s Entangled Life which highlights the ecological role of fungi and fungal networks. Yang wants her work to achieve interaction and participation from audiences. The ‘intention’ is to let audiences not just passive observers, but enter the works and become a part of the experience.