A Conversation with Cizzoe Yi Wang
Intimacy, Conflict & Play
Cizzoe Yi Wang (b. 2000, China) is an interdisciplinary artist based in London, whose work explores the nuanced convergence of social interaction, performance, and systems of control. With an academic background spanning film practices, social anthropology, and ethnographic documentary, Wang draws from a multidisciplinary foundation to construct participatory installations and performances that probe the mechanics of human behavior. Her practice is driven by the proposition that social interaction itself is a form of gameplay—structured by implicit and explicit rules, negotiations of power, and fluid group dynamics.
In Wang’s work, the viewer is not merely an observer but often a participant, asked to engage with performative instructions that produce unpredictable, often revealing, results. Her installations function as microcosmic systems where intimacy and conflict, spontaneity and order, constraint and freedom are in continuous tension. Through structured games and ritualized exchanges, she creates environments where players must navigate shared space and power, often arriving at moments of clarity, resistance, or absurdity.
This conceptual inquiry spans various formats, including sculpture, film, performance, and text-based work. Wang invites participants into carefully constructed situations that interrogate the limits of autonomy, the mechanics of control, and the aesthetics of choice. Her performances and installations resist resolution, often ending where they begin: in a space of suspended action, governed as much by what is withheld as by what is performed.
Julien Delagrange: Great to have you on CAI for a conversation. I would like to begin by discussing the interdisciplinary nature of your practice. Can you describe how your background in social anthropology informs the way you approach art-making today, and how one started to support the other and vice versa?
Cizzoe Yi Wang: My practice has always grown out of a sustained curiosity about how individuals act within social systems and how they are perceived. During my undergraduate degree in film practice, which was situated within a School of Cultural and Heritage Studies, and later through postgraduate training in ethnographic and documentary film in an Anthropology department, I found myself returning again and again to the same fundamental question: what defines us as human?
In those early years, I approached documentary both as a practical research and as an embodied experience. Immersing myself in a community, a rural setting, or a particular social group, I would record from within, allowing direct encounters to shape the work. Over time, this methodology evolved from an emphasis on observation to active participation in existing social patterns, and eventually toward initiating performative experiments that explore what kinds of behaviours might remain concealed under the social pressure to present the “perfect human.” Anthropology, to me, is both the starting point of inquiry and the ultimate framework of reflection, continuously shaping the way I make and think about art.
JD: Your practice incorporates a range of mediums—from installation and sculpture to film and performance. How do you determine which form a particular idea should take?
CYW: To be honest, the choice of medium depends on the subject I want to explore. When my work engages with a specific community or an ethnically distinctive group, I tend to choose documentary as the medium, as it enables me to explore and participate while preserving a sense of organicity, rawness, and authenticity. Whereas when the focus shifts to more ontological questions of human interaction, such as what it means to exist and relate to others, beyond specific contexts or circumstances, I gravitate toward creating interactive installations structured by “game rules.” Within these rules, I construct a microcosm of social systems, inviting participants to navigate and reinterpret these structured environments through play. In this process, the open-ended answers to the questions gradually unfold.
JD: What is your process like when moving from a conceptual idea to a physical realization?
CYW: The process of moving from concept to physical realization is always challenging. In my current practice, I would consider physical realisation as part of the art practice but not the final outcome. The artwork could be the situation I created, the actions presented from the participants during the situation. It’s more about the sense of relational aesthetic. In that mean, I tend to approach it as constructing a reality-based game setting shaped by a particular theme. I begin by formulating the rules of the game, then move on to creating the sculpture or installation, structuring the spatial layout, and finally incorporating the participation of the public, whose engagement transforms the setting into a performative experience.
JD: You often write instructions that govern participant behavior. How do you develop these rules, and what role do they play in shaping the work’s meaning?
CYW: For me, developing rules is much like playing games with friends as a child. I begin by establishing a broad framework that reflects the concept I want to convey and suggests the kinds of actions through which that concept might take shape. The specific details of interaction and duration are then often negotiated collectively with participants, much like how rules would organically evolve in a game, and the outcome emerges through this process of negotiation. To some extent, the role of the rules can be seen as an invitation, drawing participants into an immersive game and positioning them as players within it.
JD: From this perspective, how do you embrace unpredictability in your process?
CYW: Actually, unpredictability is exactly what I hope for in the work. As I mentioned, I view my practice as an experiment, inviting participants into a situation where they can playfully navigate and reinterpret structured environments, while reflecting on themselves and others through moments of intimacy and even conflict. The emergence of unknown outcomes, the space for autonomous expression, and the way group dynamics gradually reveal themselves are, in fact, at the core of my practice.
JD: In To Win Is To Withdraw, you explore the paradox of victory through withdrawal. What inspired this conceptual proposition?
CYW: This concept developed gradually through a series of rule-based works. Initially, I aim to construct interactive frameworks that reflect group dynamics, highlighting how our decisions within society are often shaped or constrained by the decisions of others. Ultimately, how can we find a way to navigate such inevitability? Carrying this question forward, I began to think of works as infinite games, in which participants engage in continuous interaction. Over time, fatigue sets in, playfulness erodes, and competition turns relentless. Until here, I would like to invite the audience to reflect: when the game becomes exhausting, when joy fades, and the binary of winning and losing collapses, do you still want to continue? To me, withdrawal can be reframed as victory, an act of agency rather than failure. This reframing carries into life itself: stepping away can mean reclaiming autonomy and choosing a different form of triumph.
JD: The dual structure of To Win Is To Withdraw—with both a human-readable text and machine-readable G-code—is quite striking. How do you see language and code interacting in this work?
CYW: The interaction between language and code coexists within a shared structure of meaning and action.The human-readable text is interpretive; it frames life as an infinite game, open to reflection, withdrawal, and redefinition. It asks what it means to live, to win, or to withdraw. By contrast, the G-code on aluminum is procedural. It translates language into a sequence of spatial instructions. When the action stops, the machine stops; what remains is the trace of execution itself. Desire, a hardly escapable aspect of human nature, there are moments when I wish I could operate like a machine, indifferent to outcomes and focused solely on process. For me, this juxtaposition of two languages embodies a vision of shifting attention from the pursuit of results to the significance of the process itself.
JD: Triangle creates a game scenario where unity and division coexist. How did you design this piece to reflect real-world social dynamics?
CYW: When designing the rules for Triangle, I wanted to create a constant equilibrium between unity and division. Players gather in the centre yet simultaneously oppose one another. Instead of relying on the traditional order of the checkers broad game, I introduced remote-controlled traffic lights. A player can only continue while their light is green, which inevitably tempts others to press the red light to stop them from winning.
In shaping the rules, I focused on two aspects: first, introducing elements that stimulate struggles for power and control, and second, making these dynamics visible through the shifting traffic lights. Each participant holds the ability to control others, both intentionally through remote controls and unintentionally through their own moves on the checker board. Yet when all three exercise power simultaneously, control collapses, producing a paradoxical coexistence of control and loss of control. The game becomes an absurd balance, endless unless someone chooses to withdraw. At that point, withdrawal itself becomes the act of winning. In this way, the game becomes a mirror of real-world social dynamics, where collaboration and conflict, control and vulnerability, are always intertwined.
JD: Your performances often involve role-switching and improvised movement, as in Dancer or Rope Holder?. What do these shifting roles reveal about group interaction?
CYW: The shifting of roles and evolving rules are central to many of my works. In everyday life, people constantly reshape their actions in response to changing social circumstances, and social structures in turn shift through collective human behavior. This mutual unpredictability is, to me, a defining quality of human society.
In Dancer or Rope Holder?, I set up a more open framework of rules to encourage decision-making and the spontaneous emergence of movement. My curiosity about unpredictability begins with the small and incidental choices: Why do some participants always jump to the same side? Why do others only swap ropes with a fixed partner? Why do some burst forward suddenly, while others crawl slowly across the floor?
These subtle patterns reveal how individual habits, levels of risk-taking, tendencies toward mimicry, and even fatigue become visible through movement. More importantly, they show how group interaction is constantly negotiated: moments of alignment and misalignment, cooperation and resistance, happen in real time. The continual switching of roles dissolves fixed hierarchies and instead highlights how power, agency, and responsibility circulate among individuals within the group.
JD: Do you view your projects more as games, performances, or experiments?
CYW: I tend to view my projects as experiments, and this perspective is closely tied to my early education. During my GCSE and A-level studies, psychology was always the subject I felt most passionate about. What fascinated me most was designing experimental processes: writing hypotheses, shaping methodologies, and manipulating variables to explore cause and effect. This structured way of inquiry has left a lasting influence on me, and it continues to shape how I conceive and develop my artistic projects today. Games and performance are equally central to my practice. I see experimentation, play, and performance as interconnected modes that together define both my process and the ways outcomes are presented. For me, the artistic value lies in this very interplay.
JD: In Look to the Left or Right, or Neither, eye contact becomes a form of control. What drew you to this specific metaphor?
CYW: The metaphor of eye contact grew out of my own social experiences. When I was in a group where everyone was very active, I often wondered when it was appropriate to speak. It may seem like a small hesitation, but it stayed with me and led me to think of eye contact as an exclusive contract of being seen, an acknowledgment, and something I regard as sharper and more intimate than language itself.
By translating this idea into written instructions, I turned the allocation of gaze into a measurable form of permission, deciding who can braid and who must pause. Each enactment reveals how intimacy, etiquette, and moral negotiation are reconfigured in real time, whether through sustained eye contact between friends or compensatory gestures toward strangers. For me, eye contact becomes a lens to expose the subtle dynamics of inclusion, exclusion, and control within human interaction.
JD: The concept of control is central in your work. Could you elaborate on how you understand the dynamic between control and freedom in your installations?
CYW: I regard the dynamic between control and freedom as something generated by the very framework of the “instructions of play” within my installations. For me, control and freedom are not opposites but interdependent forces that coexist in tension. The instructions construct a framework that restricts participants’ actions, allowing them to physically experience what it means to be bound by constraints. At the same time, freedom emerges from within these rules, through the spaces they leave open for spontaneity and through the inherent creativity of human behavior.
People are naturally capable of breaking or resisting rules, whether because they find them unreasonable, unsatisfying, or simply wish to challenge authority. Even the act of withdrawing from the game can become a form of resistance. What I aim to observe is that within systems that feel deeply restrictive or exploitative, people still find ways to discover freedom. My role as an artist is to invite people into a temporary rule-based arena, where they can playfully navigate these tensions and experience how freedom can break through within control.
JD: Looking ahead, how do you envision the evolution of your practice? Are there new directions, mediums, or concepts you’re eager to explore?
CYW: Looking ahead, I envision my practice evolving through a closer integration of instruction-based creation with installation, performance, and moving image. At present, I am committed to expanding the boundaries of instruction as a core element, pushing them beyond written text or live audience interaction. I hope to explore how instruction-based creation, combined with the spirit of experimentation and the capacity to reveal the essence of human interaction, can be visually preserved, communicated, and disseminated in more impactful ways.
Last Updated on November 3, 2025
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About the author:
Julien Delagrange (b. 1994, BE) is an art historian, contemporary artist, and the director of CAI and CAI Gallery. Previously, Delagrange has worked for the Centre for Fine Arts (BOZAR) in Brussels, the Jan Vercruysse Foundation, and the Ghent University Library. His artistic practice and written art criticism are strongly intertwined, examining contemporary art in search of new perspectives in the art world.
