MICHEL YANG
BIO
Michel Yang is an American born, Brussels-based performance artist. Her work explores notions on identity and cultural hybridity. Her own creations have involved rewriting scars, brick-laying her body, fashioning heels out of candle holders, teaching French while speaking fake Chinese… Such works root from her practices on tracing resistance, framing identity, and embodying objects, spectres, and nothing. Michel’s primary medium is the body, however, video and photography have recently begun to enter her work as extensions of her body practice. Presently she is following an audio-visual post-graduate with Sound Image Culture.
Michel received a Master of Fine Arts in Dance at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts and has completed a post- graduate study in performance with a.pass. As a performer she has worked with Lilia Mestre, Stefan Dreher, Pierre Droulers, Mia Lawrence, and Walter Verdin to name a few. As a teacher Michel’s subjects are contemporary dance, improvisation, and forms of materialization.
She is teacher and mentor at the dance department of the Royal Conservatory in Antwerp. As well she is a member of the CORPoREAL research group. Other companies and schools where she has taught include Ultima Vez, Summer Studios, Charleroi Danses, D.A.N.C.E. Apprentices, Washington University… .
FRAME OF RESEARCH
During the 2-month residency (April – May), I’m focusing on a few practices that are obliquely linked to each other. The idea is to deepen in the practices by practicing them with others. As well as to clarify the bridges between them.
Instigated by recent health concerns, I am searching for a rite of passage.
Taking object-use in my performances as my starting point, I am arranging, constructing, wearing, displaying, washing, mapping diverse kinds of knowledge. Knowledge concerning my body ranging from traditional medicine to alternative perspectives on well-being, from my relationship to food, to oracular reading of the viscera. Knowledge taking the form of objects, texts, images, and video. Knowledge in the action of drawing, carving, filming, vocalising. Partly reflection and partly ritual I am puzzling an atlas from the knowledge concerning my body. What secret relations and intimate correspondences will appear?
https://michelyang.wordpress.com
https://scarstoriesinstallation.wordpress.com