A Conversation with Yidi Wang

Yidi Wang (born in 1999, Shijiazhuang, China, lives and works in Chicago, the United States) is a Chinese interdisciplinary new media artist and an arts professional, working as an educator and curator. Her practice spans performance, audiovisual installation, and speculative design, and is informed by a background in design and emerging technologies. She holds an MFA in Design for Emerging Technologies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where her work developed from socially driven interactive design towards more performance-based and research-led investigations into the body, technology, and posthuman narratives. Although Wang’s works often appear highly rational and research-oriented, they also seem to function as a way of approaching more personal and biographical questions.

This becomes particularly visible in the project—central to Wang’s practice and to the upcoming conservation—Post-Birth, in which all moving elements of her versatile practice seem to come together and even expose what stirs deep inside the artist to create. In this multi-media installation, Wang wore an external uterus and enacted a cycle of simulated pregnancy through repetitive bodily gestures such as prenatal yoga, breathwork, touch, and routine check-ups. Bacteria cultured from her own hair, skin, and nails were nurtured in the external uterus, functioning as symbolic yet tangible children. The performance shifts into an installation comprising an external uterus preserved in formalin, bacterial cultures placed in an infant incubator, video documentation of the performance-based activities related to pregnancy and motherhood, and a laboratory table displaying surgical tools and bodily fragments. While the work adopts a clinical and research-oriented aesthetic, Wang explicitly connects it to her personal history and upbringing, particularly her experiences of motherhood, care, authority, and gendered expectations within a Chinese family context. The artwork, therefore, may appear analytical and conceptually rational, but the impelling force consists of conflicts and struggles from within that are utmost in their personal, emotional, and intuitive dimensions.

Two related installations, Blueprint and Imprint, further extend these concerns. Blueprint presents a series of empty, 3D-printed resin vessels shaped as imagined external uteri, suspended in a linear structure and connected to a central but vacant system. The work leaves the reproductive framework unresolved, positioning the structure itself as a question rather than a functional apparatus. Imprint translates Wang’s performance practice into an interactive installation featuring silicone casts of her own body, embedded with audio recordings of poems addressed to her mother. Together, these works situate Wang’s practice within a broader exploration of reproduction, kinship, technological mediation, and intergenerational relationships. Wang has exhibited internationally at venues including the Chinese American Museum of Chicago, the Barbara Galeta Contemporary Art Foundation in Barcelona, Mana Contemporary, No Nation Tangential and Space Lab, EEA Gallery in New York, and the Carolyn S. Mark Gallery in Wisconsin. But today, we have the pleasure of discovering and discovering her work on CAI. 

Julien Delagrange: Your early work was rooted in socially driven interactive design. What motivated your shift towards performance and research-based practices involving your own body?

Yidi Wang: I was trained as a designer, but I always knew I wanted to move toward fine art. As a designer, conversations often focused on usability and function, while I was more interested in concept, meaning, and critical dialogue. That desire led me to come to the United States to pursue my MFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. I was never a painter or a drawer, and even in fine art, my way of thinking remained deeply rooted in design—systems, structures, and processes. Instead of forcing myself into traditional media, I began searching for a medium that could carry those ways of thinking while allowing more personal and conceptual expression. That was when I encountered performance art.

I was immediately drawn to performance because the body is such a powerful medium. It holds memory, emotion, labor, and vulnerability in a way that no object or interface can. Through working with my own body, I began to connect my design thinking with lived experience. As my research deepened, my focus gradually became clearer, and performance allowed me to develop my subject matter through sustained inquiry rather than user-oriented outcomes.

JD: Many of your projects adopt a scientific and clinical visual language. What role does this aesthetic play in how you approach personal and emotional subject matter?

YW: If you look across my work, the research has always followed the same core concerns, gradually deepening rather than shifting direction. My first fine art project, a live performance titled JIWA (The Chicken Baby) (2021), was already rooted in questions of family, expectation, and control. JIWA is a term used in Chinese to describe children who grow up under intense pressure, often in middle-class families where parents project their own unfulfilled dreams onto their children in the hope of upward mobility or a “better life.” I am a JIWA myself, and recognizing this was a turning point in how I understood both my background and my practice.

From that moment, I began to realize that much of my research is inseparable from my own upbringing in China, and from the ways motherhood, misogyny, and sacrifice are culturally structured and passed down. These themes have continued to surface throughout my work, not as isolated topics, but as a sustained line of inquiry that has grown more layered over time. The scientific and clinical visual language I use plays a critical role in how I approach this deeply personal material. It creates a deliberate distance from emotion, allowing me to work with intimate subject matter without turning it into confession. By borrowing the aesthetics of laboratories, medical devices, and research systems, I frame personal experience as something that can be observed, measured, and questioned rather than simply felt.

This approach is also a form of dissociating and repositioning myself as an observer of my own history. The distance it creates is not about detachment, but about care. It mirrors how I want the audience to encounter the work: not only through empathy, but through reflection and an awareness of how private experiences are shaped by larger social, cultural, and institutional structures.

JD: In Post-Birth, you treat bacteria cultured from your own body as symbolic offspring. Did you experience any form of emotional or instinctive attachment during the performance, despite its constructed framework?

YW: The attachment I experienced during Post-Birth was real, but not in a sentimental or nurturing way. It was strange, invasive, and often uncomfortable. The bacteria were growing constantly, twenty-four hours a day, and because they came from my own body, they entered my life in a way that felt unavoidable. They did not feel like something I owned or chose; they felt like something that occupied me. I was carrying a resin “womb” that I designed, which was physically heavy and worn on my body throughout the day—going to the studio, going to school, moving through public space. The smell, the weight, and the responsibility gradually reshaped my daily behavior. I stopped going out socially and avoided situations where my presence might affect others. My life changed because they were there.

At first, I was interested in whether emotional attachment to non-human life could resemble motherhood, and whether that attachment might open a path toward becoming post-human—by granting non-human organisms a form of agency comparable to human life. But as the performance continued, I realized I did not want to frame the work around whether I was “successful” or not in achieving that idea. Instead, what became clear was a shifting power dynamic. The bacteria were alive, autonomous, and actively reorganizing my time, body, and decisions. Care was no longer something I controlled; it was something that constrained me. This experience made me more interested in questioning traditional models of motherhood—ownership, sacrifice, and control—than in positioning myself as the mother of a non-human being.

JD: The performance later became a multi-media installation with preserved objects and documentation. How did this shift from live practice to spatial installation change your relationship to the work?

YW: The shift from live performance to spatial installation created distance, but it also reflected a change in how I understood the work itself. During the performance, my body was continuously implicated—physically, emotionally, and socially—through care, repetition, and endurance. Once the work moved into installation, that immediacy was replaced by space for reflection, allowing the project to exist without needing to be resolved through my body.

Preserving the womb, the incubator, and the documentation transformed lived experience into traces rather than conclusions. Instead of positioning myself as the mother of a non-human being, the installation holds open the possibility of that relationship while simultaneously questioning it. This shift made it possible for the work to move beyond proof and toward inquiry. By removing my body from the center, the installation invites viewers to confront the assumptions embedded in traditional motherhood—ownership, sacrifice, control, and obligation—and to consider motherhood not as a fixed role, but as a contested structure shaped by power, care, and negotiation.

Yidi Wang, Post-Birth, 2023. Human hair, nails, acrylic, agar, infant incubator, petri dish, glass container, formalin, fabric, digital video — variable dimensions. Courtesy the artist © Yidi Wang

Yidi Wang, Hair (from Post-Birth), 2023. Human hair — 4 x 4 in. Courtesy the artist © Yidi Wang

Yidi Wang, Nails (from Post-Birth), 2023. Human hair — 4 x 4 in. Courtesy the artist © Yidi Wang

Yidi Wang, Skin (from Post-Birth), 2023. Human hair — 4 x 4 in. Courtesy the artist © Yidi Wang

Yidi Wang, The Baby (from Post-Birth), 2023. Bacteria from human hair, skin and nails — 4 x 4 in. Courtesy the artist © Yidi Wang

Yidi Wang, The Incubator (from Post-Birth), 2023. Acrylic, agar, infant incubator, Petri dish — 22 x 21.5 x 29.5 in. Courtesy the artist © Yidi Wang

Yidi Wang, The Lab (from Post-Birth), 2023. Human hair, skin, nails, petri dish, CRT TV, digital video — variable dimensions. Courtesy the artist © Yidi Wang

Yidi Wang, The Mom (from Post-Birth), 2023. Digital print — 19 x 24 in. Courtesy the artist © Yidi Wang

Yidi Wang, The Womb (from Post-Birth), 2023. Acrylic, agar, glass container, formalin, fabric — 11.5 x 13.5 x 19.5 in. Courtesy the artist © Yidi Wang

 

 

JD: You describe Post-Birth as proposing alternatives to human-centered reproduction and new forms of kinship. How do you personally understand these alternatives within the context of the project?

YW: My initial idea was to test whether emotional attachment to non-human life was possible, and whether that attachment could resemble motherhood. If such a bond could exist, then non-human beings might be granted a form of agency and ethical consideration usually reserved for humans—opening a way to imagine a world where humans and non-humans share power rather than exist in hierarchy. At the time, I believed that breaking human-centered reproduction was also a way to break gender binaries at their root. Much of my research began with questions around abortion and misogyny, and in my thinking, these systems are deeply tied to rigid gender structures. To challenge that unfairness, I felt it was necessary to move beyond human-centered and gendered frameworks altogether, which led me to experiment with non-human life as a site of care and kinship.

However, the project is also deeply personal. My understanding of misogyny comes from my own cultural background and from growing up in an East Asian family. I witnessed how my mother carried forms of internalized misogyny shaped by social and cultural expectations, and how that pain was passed down to me. I do not see her as someone to blame, but as another victim within the same system. In this sense, Post-Birth challenges motherhood not to reject it, but to question how it is structured by sacrifice, obligation, and inherited suffering. While the project operates within a larger framework of post-humanism and expanded kinship, its emotional core comes from my relationship with my mother. The alternatives I propose are not solutions, but ways of opening space to rethink care, gender, and power without reproducing the same forms of inequality.

JD: In Blueprint, the reproductive system is entirely empty and unresolved. What does this absence allow conceptually that a functioning system would not?

YW: In Blueprint, the emptiness of the uterus is the conceptual center of the work. The research continues from Post-Birth and later into Imprint, but during the creation of Blueprint I became aware that the philosophical scale of post-human discourse risked becoming too distant from the body itself. I wanted to return to the reproductive structure in its most direct form. By keeping the uterus empty and unresolved, reproduction is suspended rather than enacted. There is no confirmation of life, no evidence of loss, and no biological outcome. This absence allows motherhood to exist in an indeterminate state—you do not know if it has happened, is about to happen, or will never happen.

A functioning reproductive system would immediately impose narrative: success, failure, birth, grief, fulfillment. The empty uterus resists those projections. It holds potential without resolution, allowing reproduction to be understood not as an event, but as a condition shaped by expectation, pressure, and imagination. In this way, the work shifts focus from biological production to psychological and social space. The uterus becomes a structure of suspension, where motherhood is neither confirmed nor denied, but left open—unstable, speculative, and defined as much by uncertainty as by life itself.

JD: Reading your statement, it feels as if the relationship with your mother is not just a background context, but one of the emotional engines behind these projects. Do you see Post-Birth and the related installations as a way of revisiting, negotiating, or reworking that early relationship?

YW: Yes, I do see Post-Birth and the related installations as a way of revisiting and negotiating my relationship with my mother, though not in a literal or autobiographical sense. That relationship operates more as an emotional engine than as narrative content. It shapes how I understand care, sacrifice, obligation, and inheritance, even when it is not visibly represented. Growing up in an East Asian family, I witnessed how my mother carried forms of internalized misogyny shaped by cultural expectation. Many of the pressures and sacrifices she endured were passed down to me, not intentionally, but structurally. I felt the weight of that inheritance while growing up, yet at the same time, I cannot position her as someone to blame. She was also a product—and a victim—of the same system.

Through works like Post-Birth, I am not trying to reconstruct our relationship, but to examine the structures that shaped it. By translating motherhood into scientific, performative, and post-human frameworks, I create distance that allows reflection rather than accusation. In this sense, the work becomes a space to rework emotional history—holding both empathy and critique at once. It allows me to confront inherited pain while also imagining how care and motherhood might exist outside the cycles of sacrifice and control that defined our relationship.

JD: Imprint includes audio poems addressed to your mother. How did writing and recording these texts differ from working through performance and installation?

YW: As I mentioned earlier, the research that began with Post-Birth continued into Blueprint and Imprint. The conversation around motherhood has never stopped—it has simply moved through different frameworks. At its core, my personal relationship with my mother has always been one of the emotional engines behind the work. In Imprint, I made a conscious decision to move in the opposite direction from Post-Birth. Instead of working through a post-human philosophical lens, I chose to focus directly on the relationship itself. I did not construct systems, question motherhood conceptually, or frame it through scientific or speculative structures. I simply presented my position as a daughter.

Writing and recording the audio poems required a level of vulnerability that was very different from performance and installation. The texts consist of sentences spoken to my mother—expressing pain, guilt, anger, and emotional numbness. Rather than analyzing or mediating these feelings, I allowed them to exist in their raw complexity. If performance allowed me to process motherhood through distance and structure, Imprint removed that distance. It became a space where I could show the emotional contradictions of the relationship directly—without resolution, judgment, or protection—only vulnerability.

Visit Yidi Wang’s website here.

Last Updated on February 14, 2026