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.

Michel received a Master of Fine Arts in Dance at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. In 2000 she relocated to Brussels, Belgium where her curiosity carried her to other branches of dance and performance, working in inter-disciplinary projects, improvisation, and performance installations. Michel 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. A few places where she teaches include Ultima Vez, The Royal Conservatory Antwerpen, Summer Studios, Charleroi Danses, D.A.N.C.E. Apprentices, Washington University… .

FRAME OF RESEARCH

Partly reflection and partly ritual, I am puzzling a spatial atlas of the knowledge concerning my body, attempting to humanise data collected of the body and liaising objects of past projects with disruptive foods.  In the frame of a performative installation, the outcome includes a series of meditative drawings, an oracular reading of slop, and video vignettes attempting to capture intangible animistic rituals.