Yolanda Yang Scratches Deep Below the Surface of Grief and Art
Yolanda He Yang, still from Itchy Grief performed at Vivid Oblivion, 2024. Photograph by Cameron Boyce, courtesy of the artist.
The first feeling of what Yolanda Yang would later name “itchy grief” came to her when she received the call that her uncle had died just as she was about to leave the house. She went about that day in a haze, grappling with the circumstance of grieving a loved one while being so far away from her family in China. That pang of grief would follow her, burrowing itself into the foundation of what would become Yang’s titular multipart performance piece, Itchy Grief.
“I am obsessed with the gestures and intricacies of mourning, as well as the need for it. The pessimistic side of my perspective drives me to confront the abyss and, through that, seek truth,” Yang states.
Itchy Grief is an ever-evolving piece which shifts depending on the site, audience, and available materials. There’s always a moment of creating something fragile, like writing letters or forming shapes that are destined to dissolve,” Yang tells IMPULSE. As she performs fragments from poems on her own experiences of grief, she invites the audience to toss a balloon, keeping it floating in the air. She speaks directly to her congregation, placing tokens into their hands and building their reactions into the work. She collects dust and dirt, marking the space or her own clothes with it: ephemeral indicators of the artist and her participants’ presence in the space, made to be lost physically to time. This impermanence, Yang asserts, is “central—it’s not about preserving, but about acknowledging loss and the cycles of decay and regeneration.”
Still from Itchy Grief performed at Clara Wainwright Studio, 2024. Photograph by Bell Beecher Pitkin, courtesy of the artist.
Yang originally went to school for arts administration, receiving her Master of Science at Boston University in 2021. One day, while working for an architecture firm, she discovered thin wires on site and began using them to make sculptures. When she moved into larger installation pieces, Yang became fascinated with not only the end product of installation, but also the liminal space existing within the time spent creating a piece. Speaking on the ritual of artmaking, she details, “I find myself drawn to the openness of process, where every action feels like an inquiry—into myself, my beliefs, and the opposing forces that drive me. It’s a space where the questions remain raw and unresolved, where I can meet my vulnerabilities and extend them outward to the viewer.” In 2024, Yang completed her MFA at Boston University’s sculpture program.
It is the active building process, rather than the completed product, that interests Yang most in her own artistic practice: “Process-based art is where the truth resides. It’s not just about arriving at a finished product; it’s about the act of becoming, the raw confrontation with materials, emotions, and ideas.” This approach often leads her toward a fascinating, teetering line in which she blurs art and life, inviting her viewer to question traditional artistic values and find new spaces for art to flourish.
Still from Itchy Grief performed at Vox Populi, 2024. Photograph by Shosh Isaacs, courtesy of the artist.
Her public art demonstration, Blank Paper, based on the Blank Paper Protests occurring throughout China in 2022 in response to the intense government’s COVID-19 measures and censorship, is performance art, demonstration, and also an outright protest. Yang stands in murky waters, constantly treading between the simulated and the real, and therein she lays the foundation for her artistic practice. She punctures into the intimate space where pain and grief reside by rejecting the promise of finality and closure offered in a traditional art environment, leaving the participant to sit in their own “itchy” feelings long after her performance.
Itchy Grief is indicative of Yang’s larger talent for activating her participants: she finds common ground in the shared language of grief and invites them to be part of a larger process, whether that be affecting the context in which Itchy Grief is performed, through passive viewership or active participation in portions of the piece, coaxing some of the emotions normally constrained to the artist in the creation process.
“The line between art and process is fluid for me,” Yang explains. “Sometimes the process is the art—the dust I collect, the words I write, the mourning gestures I perform. Other times, the process leaves behind a residue, something tangible that becomes the art object. But the art is never just the object; it’s always the living thread of creation, the tension between what’s felt and what’s seen.”
