Zhiyuan Yang - A Family of Three

About

Beijing-born, Brooklyn-based artist Zhiyuan Yang explores identity, family structure, and the profound affect that government and social policy has on both. In the three series of works presented here, Yang examines not only relationships between political legislation and family, but also the tensions between emerging feminist politics and patriarchal traditions. In a collaborative process with her parents, Yang uses performance, photography, and video to challenge normative definitions of gender and ethnicity, and to complicate social structure. Through masquerade, role play, staged poses, costumes, and humor, her photographs express an awkward familial intimacy and construct alternatives to social and familial interaction.