Yiqing Lei
SCULPTURE & PHOTOGRAPHY
Dec 8, 2025
You describe yourself as a "nomadic artist" living in "multiple temporal spaces." How does this sense of constant movement shape the work you make?
Constant movement is the condition under which my work takes shape. Each piece becomes a direct imprint of the specific time and space I inhabit. Whether I was confined within a school campus trying to break out of its physical boundaries, stranded in China during the pandemic searching for a renewed aesthetic, or navigating the instability of my life in the U.K., my work has always been anchored in the reality of my situation.
I move through the world with a restlessness I cannot fully quiet, and my practice inherits this restlessness—always shifting, mutating, resisting a singular form. I often feel that I only understand a place once I leave it, as if distance is required for truth to appear. Exile and return form a continuous cycle inside me.
Like Chantal Akerman’s Les Rendez-vous d’Anna, my life feels like a perpetual train journey— landscapes passing, dissolving, and reappearing in fractured intervals. Memory becomes the present, and the present becomes something I physically carry: the temporary bed I sleep in, the once-exotic streets of Olneyville that slowly became familiar, the textures and sensations gathered through each displacement.
These accumulated traces function as metaphysical materials. They shape an interior world of temporal disjunctions that feeds directly into my sculptural and photographic language. As I keep collecting, arranging, and assembling fragments of experience—objects, images, encounters, atmospheres—something slowly surfaces: a shifting, flickering structure of belonging that does not belong anywhere.
What remains constant throughout all my movements is the sincerity of responding to each moment as it is—the search for language, identity, and grounding in a world that is always changing beneath my feet. My work is a map of that ongoing search.
Your work explores “unspeakable sensation” and “intangible moments.” How do you translate these ephemeral experiences into physical objects and spaces?
Most of my works hinge on the viewer’s physical presence—one must stand there, touch, pause, inhabit the moment in order to access what is ephemeral. The tangible elements of my practice function as anchors, but the real event is the invisible: a condition of attention, memory, and passing time.
I have come to understand that many of my works are not objects in the traditional sense but situations—sculptural happenings that unfold in states of flux. Physical objects become vessels that encapsulate ephemeral experience, allowing uncertainty to occur: uncertainty in form, meaning, and duration. They host processes of alteration and decay, inviting the audience to witness an experience that is always becoming and always slipping away.
The intangible quality of my work is inseparable from its process, which I feel like it’s not about arriving to a conclusion but the making process itself can speak for my situation completely. There is a resistance to fixity which makes my work ambiguous and formless. The intangible is the shadow, the light, the air, the texture your body recalls, the situation you went through. And it is a language made of air, chances, and encounters. In this way, the ephemeral language emerges through presence, through the viewer’s movement, and through the small shifts in the environment that activate the work.
In your statement, you describe a shift from large-scale, site-specific happenings to smaller, accumulative studio works. What prompted this transition? Was it driven more by external circumstances (like space, time, context) or by an internal change in how you felt or relate to materiality?
From 2019 to 2020, my practice centered on performance-based installations—works that were intangible, site-specific, and conceptual, existing more as sculptural happenings that occurred only once. My works “Window of the World” and “Milk Delivery”, created in China after returning during the pandemic, fully embraced a guerrilla sensibility inspired by the Chinese 85 New Wave movement. They were responses to rapidly shifting surroundings, and the instability of the environment defined the work.
The transition began during the pandemic, when I returned to China and unexpectedly entered a year-long gap. I traveled to Yunnan to build houses and teach in rural villages. I went through a car accident and experienced an earthquake.
By the time I returned to the U.S. in 2021, I found myself grounded in a new way. I feel like my nomadic experience in China has provided me a strong internal force — a momentum or energy I had never felt before, an unknown emotion and curiosity towards the new world.
I become much more grounded in material and the making process. My practice no longer depended on large, external spaces or unpredictable environments; instead, I became drawn to the small cumulative gestures that form slowly over time. Fleeting inspirations became seeds that grew into layered forms through repetition, patience, and sustained attention.
This transition marked a moment of peace with my own sensibility in material and aesthetic. Instead of relying largely on the environment, I began to use my inner force to build, to weave a physical world. In Chinese, it’s called “内观”(Vipassana?) My artistic decisions shifted from reacting to external chaos to listening to an inner, quieter, more intimate world.
(Today, the works I make feel more concrete, yet they continue to inherit a nomadic quality— movement, ephemerality, and the sense of drifting remain embedded in their structure. The shift to smaller studio works was not simply a change of scale; it was a change of consciousness, a turning inward, and an ongoing dialogue with materiality that feels truer to where I am now.) (I don’t know if I should put it.)
Is there a particular work that is meaningful to you? Could you share the creative process behind it? / What are you working on now, and what directions are you curious to explore next?
I recently completed a new body of work. When I returned to China last November, I felt an urgent and almost irrational desire to destroy the things that had long gathered dust in my childhood home. Among them were four boxes of textbooks from my nine years of compulsory education. These objects had lost their function, sitting inert, waiting for a new configuration. I began to wonder if they could be transformed, less through symbolic meaning than through the memory held in their material.
At the Taoxichuan Glass Art Studio, I was given the space to test this question. Using hot slumping and kiln forming, I embedded the textbook covers between sheets of molten glass. The process was violent. Paper, when exposed to fire, burns chaotically. However, in this case, the glass pulled oxygen from the flame, freezing the combustion process midstream. What resulted was an image of entrapment. A breath suspended in transparency. A trace preserved just before vanishing.
Later, I polished the fragments and assembled them into clear glass structures. These forms are not narrative containers. They are bodiless, offering no fixed identity. They remain open, vacant, waiting. The work's meaning shifts with light, location, and angle.
My practice has always existed between exhibition and disappearance. Some works resist traditional display formats and exist in states of flux. I just concluded a residency in Jingdezhen at the Taoxichuan Glass Studio, and I'll continue working with various materials and processes, including photography. I'm also developing a self-published artist book that brings together my images and writing in printed form.
Your work ARTICLE LOST introduces fragile materials like glass and string stretched across architectural space. How do you think about tension in these materials, and how does that tension relate to your ideas of transparency and fragility?
In ARTICLE LOST, the thread stretched across two buildings becomes a line of tension that draw attention to the poetic potential of space, to how the human eye perceives distance in relation to its own body.
The original inspiration came on the way to New York. The glittering city in the distance as I take the subway. Made me feel how different the sights from afar were from when I was inside the city. As soon as I begin to find my way into the city. The landscape vanishes just like the facade of a building as we enter it. The work is essentially about the tension of distance, the feeling of looking across an architectural gap at something far away. The distance embedded in the installation reflects a kind of emotional remoteness I was facing at the time—a tension between closeness and alienation that became spatial, material, and perceptual.
When working with materials, I continuously ask myself:
“What does it feel like to put myself in this place?”
“What does it feel like to touch, handle, or assembling this material?”
Instinct, physical labor, and sensory experience become essential. The materials do not simply occupy space; they fill space with a feeling, with the experience I want the viewer to encounter.
There is a resistance in fragile material. They are always on the verge of breaking, and this edge state creates a natural tension: things hold together precisely at the moment as they threaten to fall apart. Working with fragile material feels unpredictable and exciting. I love the fact that some of the pieces have its own life cycle, they fade away with time, breaks and cannot accompany me on my turbulent, mobile life.
The work ARTICLE LOST is the start of my art practice, the interplay between strength and fragility, construction and decay, memory and material, permanence and disappearance continue in my later art career.
You mention creating "containers, portals for the wandering souls." Could you share more about this topic?
Portal function as temporary shelters, a misplacement site. It holds the residue of the past and memories that have not yet settled in meaning. A container allows multiple things to happen all at once. To allow my work to be in the in-between forms, in-between states. Portals manifest in many different forms throughout my work. In the early stages, they existed as a piece of film. In Time Piece, for instance, the work is placed directly in front of the eye, and through a magnifying glass, one sees the image imprinted on film. It's a fixed clock, yet also a time device that belongs to another dimension.
In Providence, a transparent crystal sphere reflects images that shift depending on the surrounding environment. It is an escape and also a window, a lens through which to observe another place. In my 2024 work Come as You Are, as you were, I used photography more directly as a portal. I transformed my photographs into three artist books, placing them within the installation. Viewers must crouch down, turn the pages, and physically touch the images and texts; through these gestures, their bodies unknowingly enter the atmosphere of the work.
What artists, writers, or experiences have influenced the way you make work?
My all time favorite art piece is “Shangri-La” created by Patty Chang.
Many of your works feel site-specific, responding to particular spaces. How do you approach creating work for specific locations?
I don’t think about space until I have an idea about the body. Unless the space itself is the body. Normally, when I start a new piece, I work with the material for a long time, trying to pull strings of subconscious out of the material. Space is in conversation with my sculptural body all the time, but it usually comes out in my dreams. It is important for me to document my dreams, my diaries. Playing and drawing, and imaging. I think about a physical object in relation to a corridor, a street, a private room, an open plaza, in a garbage dump. I engage with these curious in a process of “physical thinking”, through which I test and question their potential.