YAO QINGMEI

At the heart of the exhibition is Steel Garden, her latest two-channel video installation. The work draws from the grand floral displays erected annually during moments of national celebration. Through a series of precise and lingering images—close-ups of flowers, birds foraging among cracks, weeds growing between paving stones, the varied postures of visitors, and the synchronised gesture of crowds during the flag-raising ceremony—Yao reveals the subtle relationships between individual action, collective ritual, and the constructed natural landscape.

This multi-chapter video work begins with news reports on specially cultivated festival flowers and culminates in a floating, dust-like vocal poem from the artist’s own perspective. Drawing upon the concepts of the ‘moving garden’ and the ‘third landscape’ by French gardener Gilles Clément, the work also references descriptions of pain and hallucination experienced by the soldier Pavel Korchagin in the Soviet novel How the Steel Was Tempered (1934) to reveal the biopolitical framework that underlies this monumental ritual.

The exhibition also brings together works spanning more than 10 years, offering a contextual understanding of Yao’s sustained inquiry into symbolic gesture, embodied practice, and moving-image construction. Beginning with early public space interventions and documented performances, Yao initially used video as a means of recording her embodied actions. Over time, she has increasingly turned toward filmic construction, developing a more deliberate cinematic language that positions her both in front of and behind the camera.

This evolution is visible in works such as The Third Internationale in Monaco (2012) and Dance! Dance! Bruce Ling! (2013), in which Yao performs as a protagonist navigating staged situations that parody ideological choreography. In more recent projects, including Prelude to Love (2023), she adopts the role of a director, shaping narrative, movement, and mise-en-scène to investigate how collective identities are formed, reinforced, or unsettled. Across her body of work, Yao Qingmei articulates a distinctive, incisive voice within contemporary art—one attuned to the shifting dynamics of patriotism, spectacle, everyday life, and public space in the twenty-first century. Steel Garden offers a focused yet expansive lens into her practice, foregrounding an artist whose observations of ritual, power, and lived experiences resonate far beyond their point of origin.