zhenrui yang

This project explores the layered relationship between personal identity, cultural belonging, and spatial memory through the lens of Zhenrui Yang’s experience as a member of the Bai ethnic minority in China. Though she does not speak the Bai language fluently, Yang occupies the position of a cultural in-betweener—situated at the periphery of ancestral knowledge, yet deeply entangled in its affective and symbolic resonances.

Working primarily in oil painting and mixed media, Yang draws upon familial memory, ritual fragments, and regional cosmologies to investigate how cultural meaning is lived, felt, and embodied across generations. Informed by Fei Xiaotong’s concept of chang (field), her practice understands culture not as fixed identity but as a relational space—a dynamic, overlapping field shaped by kinship, geography, and belief.

Yang’s canvases function as sites of spatial and emotional accumulation, where language, landscape, and inherited rituals press into material form. Rather than seeking to depict or preserve a coherent narrative, her work dwells in ambiguity and partial knowledge, tracing the subtle textures of being both inside and outside of a tradition.

Through her painterly surfaces—layered, fragmentary, and tactile—Yang gives shape to the invisible fields that bind body and place, memory and myth, voice and silence. Her project becomes a visual inquiry into how identity is situated, negotiated, and reimagined within the margins of collective history.