Fengzee Yang is a Chicago-based artist who makes body-vessels that encapsulate suspended identity and echo nonlinear time, where memory, absence, and longing coexist. She earned her BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Her works have been exhibited at spaces including Comfort Station, The Plan, Slow Dance Space, Tala, ARC Gallery, Artruss, and Cochrane Woods Art Center of the University of Chicago. She has participated in artist residencies at Jingdezhen International Studio, Jingdezhen, China;  Oxbow School of Art, MI;  Vermont Studio Center, VT; and ACRE Residency, WI. 

Can you tell us about your background and how you started your artistic journey?

I am a sculpture-based artist currently living and working in Chicago. I earned my BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where my formal artistic journey began. It was during my time there that I became obsessed with the physical weight and the hands-on process of sculptures.

What are the main themes or concepts you explore in your work?

I’m exploring the theme of how the body can be understood as a responsive apparatus of time and memory, an interface that translates, filters, and extends. It carries a form of memory where every encounter leaves a subtle imprint, folding back into its structure. The body acts as a mechanism that reshapes the conditions of its own existence, sensing and reorganizing in a constant state of transformation. In this sense, the body constitutes the logic through which space comes into being. It weaves interior and exterior together, forming a field where breathing, touching, and seeing renew the texture of its envelope. Within this process, the body becomes an archive of resonance, holding the past while attuning itself toward what is yet to arrive.

The body functions as a container, archive, and anticipation. It operates as a temporal structure, converting experience into potential. Its pulse and breath form a quiet technique of survival, sustaining life through tension, modulation, and renewal.

Are there any particular mediums you prefer working with? Why?

Two of my main mediums are hand-carved wood and ceramics. I gravitate toward materials that possess their own internal clock. I primarily work with ceramics and wood because they demand a form of sustained labor that mirrors the body’s own rhythmic processes. Each takes a long time to work with. For me, clay is a responsive archive; it remembers every pressure of the finger before it is vitrified in the kiln. Wood, on the other hand, is a pre-existing record of time that I must negotiate with through carving. I choose these mediums because they don’t just represent the body; they behave like it—absorbing forces, recording encounters, and reconfiguring their boundaries through the process of making.

Who or what are your biggest influences, both artistically and personally?

Artistically, I am deeply influenced by the geological architecture of the natural world, specifically stones and fossils. I see a fossil not as a static object, but as an archive of time; it is a frozen resonance of a life once lived. Similarly, I see rocks as products of immense duration, shaped and eroded by time. In my studio, my process of adding and subtracting material is a way of mimicking the gesture of time. I want my sculptures to feel as though they weren’t just made, but that they occurred through a slow process of sedimentation and wear.

Personally, this is inseparable from my experience as an immigrant. Living between cultures forces the body to become a highly sensitive, responsive instrument. You are constantly filtering new environments and reconfiguring your own boundaries to survive. There is a persistent longing for grounding amidst the uncertainty of displacement. My work becomes the site where I weave my interior memory with the exterior world, attempting to create a sense of place through the rhythmic pulse of making. Just as the body converts experience into potential, my practice converts the tension of ‘not belonging’ into a physical, textured archive of survival.

What challenges have you faced as an artist, and how have you overcome them?

The main challenge I face is maintaining a creative pulse within a state of constant flux. We live in a time where environments, personal circumstances, and even our sense of home are frequently disrupted. I overcome this by shifting my perspective: I see these changes not as obstacles, but as the forces that shape the work. I think my work is designed to filter and translate these very pressures.

What do you hope people take away from your art when they experience it?

The question I am asked most often is whether my works are found objects. I want the viewer to feel the same tension and pulse I feel while making the work. I want them to stop looking at the sculpture as a static thing and start seeing it as a spontaneous being, a living process. I want people to realize that the human body is not separate from the natural world. Ultimately, I want the work to act as a mirror for their own existence, reminding them that they, too, are an archive of resonance.

Text & photo courtesy of Fengzee Yang

Website: https://www.fengzeeyang.com/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kfvkq/