YaYa Yajie Liang

Yaya Yajie Liang (b. 1995, China) lives and works in London, UK. After graduating with a BA in Fine Art from China Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing in 2018, she pursued an MA in Painting at the Royal College of Art, London. She is currently completing a PhD in the School of Art and Humanities at the RCA.

Yaya Yajie Liang’s work explores the fluidity, stasis, and boundary violations shared between metamorphosis, animality, queer, and diffraction. From the legendary banished beast to the biological interpenetration of space and body, she interrogates how humans’ analogic mapping to and from animals—within imagined, lived, or taxonomic intimacies—paradoxically survives the cancellation wrought by operations of abjection and casts a trans light back on the human, reconsidering the full subjectivity of the ‘human’ and reimagining what it means to be ‘human’ in an age of human-induced ecological catastrophe.

Taking inspiration from Agential Realism, Liang views painting as a movement constantly repeating the ‘becoming’. With the collapse of a single central system of representation, the unruly encounter between diverse centers, superimposed perspectives, co-existing moments, and materials are produced and reshaped in the process of painting. By taking the risk of implanting harm, she intensively invests in the agency of inanimate matter. By perceiving the intimacy that arises when the human body entangles with the former, her painting interrogates the cracks within the binary of nature and culture, animal and human.