Luka Yuanyuan Yang (b. 1989, Beijing) is a visual artist and filmmaker based in Beijing and London, working across documentary film, video art, photography and performance. Through weaving documentary and archival materials, she explores themes of identity, migration, and memory, challenging conventional historical narratives and amplifying overlooked voices.

She has held solo exhibitions at High Line Art, New York (2025); Flowers Gallery, Hong Kong (2024); ARTiX3, Tokyo (2023); OCAT Shanghai (2020); and AIKE Gallery, Shanghai (2019). Her work has been exhibited at major institutions including New Taipei City Art Museum, Taiwan; Centre for Heritage Arts & Textile, Hong Kong; Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai; Power Station of Art, Shanghai; Times Art Center Berlin, Germany; Espacio de Arte Contemporáneo, Montevideo, Uruguay; and Three Shadows Photography Art Centre, Beijing. She was an artist-in-residence at Art in General in New York, supported by the Asian Cultural Council, and at Museum Forward in Indonesia, supported by British Council Indonesia.

Her debut feature documentary Chinatown Cha-Cha was selected for the Hidden Dragon section at Pingyao International Film Festival, the Main Competition at Hawaii International Film Festival, Cleveland International Film Festival, and CAAMFest, among others. The film had a nationwide theatrical release in China in 2024 (Douban rating 8.4/10). Her short films have been featured in The New Yorker and screened at New Orleans Film Festival, Atlanta Film Festival, Camden International Film Festival, and Asian American International Film Festival.

Yang is a recipient of the BAZAAR Art Awards – Cross-Cultural Creator of the Year (2024), the BVLGARI Avrora Award (2023), and the ART POWER 100 Award (2019). She has received support from the CHANEL Culture Fund and has collaborated commercially with brands including BVLGARI, Arc’teryx, and 1436. Her works are in the collections of Power Station of Art, Kadist Art Foundation, and FENIX Museum of Migration.

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

I grew up in Beijing in the late ’80s and ’90s. When I was fourteen, I fell in love with music, film, and literature, and didn’t want to be a traditional “good student” anymore. Rock music was not mainstream in China back then — I’d find expired copies of rock magazines in supermarkets and spend hours on BBS forums discovering new bands, watching Japanese cult manga and art-house films. One thing would lead to another: a name on an album sleeve would send me down a rabbit hole into philosophy or cinema. That’s how I learned — not linearly, but by following my curiosity wherever it pulled me.

In high school, I found some college students on Douban and we started a band called “Dissolving Tomorrow.” We played at legendary Beijing venues around that time — D22, Old What, Yugong Yishan. It was the golden era of Beijing’s underground music scene, right around the Olympics. Rock music taught me what art could be: not a lifestyle choice, but a worldview, a stance. We weren’t performing for recognition. It was about expressing how we saw the world.

Around the same time, my father — an avid photography enthusiast — gave me my first camera. The moment I held it, something clicked. It was as if the camera allowed me to see the world more carefully, and to find echoes of my inner world in reality. I decided to go to art school and left for London to study photography. The UK education system was formative — it taught me independence and gave me the freedom to develop my own creative language. I’m still digesting things I absorbed during those teenage years. The writers I loved then, I still love now.

I don’t really believe in “talent” in the conventional sense. I believe in seeing — in developing a deep awareness of the world. Only through that kind of understanding can you make work that truly resonates with people.

How do you approach working with archival materials as a way of rethinking or reshaping historical narratives?

My approach has always been driven by a fundamental question: Why have we become the way we are? — as human beings, as communities. I try to look for answers in histories, particularly in the stories of migration, displacement, and the formation of cities. The world today feels increasingly fractured — islands drifting apart. I believe we need to look for the forgotten connections between cultures and nations, the bonds buried in the cracks. I always believe we need to look at our existence on a longer timeline, from a more holistic perspective.

I’ve never trusted grand, singular narratives. In school, I often felt that the history we were taught was only one version. I believe all history is ultimately composed of individual lives — and the ones that interest me most are the lives that have been overlooked or silenced.

When I work with archives, I don’t approach them like a scholar. My process is more intuitive, almost like an explorer entering a cave and following whatever glimmers of light I find. For At the Place of Crossed Sights, a project I made in Porto Alegre, Brazil in 2015–2016, I wandered the city as a photographer, asking myself what kinds of photographers might have passed through this place across different eras. I ended up creating five fictional immigrant photographers and a novelist — all alter egos of mine — and wove their stories together using real historical threads and fabricated narratives. The result was a hybrid of photography and fiction that questioned the boundaries between document and imagination.

With Dalian Mirage, I was drawn into a century of hidden history through a Japanese anti-war writer who had grown up in colonial Dalian and could never call it home again after the war. I found a fan translation of his memoir online, and the translator and I became friends — both of us explorers in the same dark cave, discovering beautiful things independently and then finding each other. That project became a kind of “spatial montage,” where characters from different eras move through the same city spaces, and the question “Where is home?” echoes across a hundred years.

With feature film Chinatown Cha-Cha and its companion book Dance in Herland, the archival dimension became even more central — and more personal. The project began in 2018 when I was on a fellowship with the Asian Cultural Council in New York. I was researching Chinese women in twentieth-century overseas entertainment — starting with Anna May Wong, one of the rare Chinese faces in early Hollywood, and then Esther Eng, an even rarer figure: a Chinese American woman director who made eleven films, nine of which are now lost. Fascinated by Esther Eng, I followed in her footsteps, visiting Cantonese opera stages, film sets, and nightclubs across Chinatown, trying to reconstruct pieces of her vanished world.

It was through that archival trail that I encountered the living women who would become the heart of the film — Coby Yee, Cynthia Yee, and the dancers of the Grant Avenue Follies. I found them not in an archive but on Facebook, and then in person on a stage in Las Vegas. What struck me was that these women were not relics of history — they were still dancing, still performing, still fully alive. The archive led me to the present, and the present breathed life back into the archive.

Dance in Herland, the book, allowed me to hold all the layers that a ninety-minute film couldn’t contain. It includes oral histories from the dancers, historical photographs and documents from the golden age of Chinatown nightclubs, Coby’s and Cynthia’s more complete life stories, reflections on Orientalism and the gaze placed on Asian women performers, and my own writing about the six-year journey of making the film. There are also stories from figures like Esther Eng whose traces first drew me into this world. For me, the book is where the research lives and breathes — all the peripheral narratives, the archival discoveries, the conversations that didn’t make it into the final cut but are essential to the full picture.

For me, archives are not dead materials. They are seeds. When you bring them into dialogue with the present — with living people, with contemporary spaces — they bloom into something new. The archival and the personal, the historical and the fictional, are always in conversation in my work. I think that’s what allows these forgotten stories to breathe again.

Working across film, video art, and photography, how do you think about the differences in how each medium carries narrative and emotion?

The impulse to create has been constant since I was fourteen — first through drawing, then photography, then books, installations, and eventually film. The forms change, but the core stays the same: I’m always telling stories, always trying to understand people and the worlds they inhabit.

Photography, for me, is about a very pure kind of attention. I still miss the feeling of walking through a city with a camera, like a hunter — not looking for anything specific, just looking, and being ready to capture what reveals itself. It’s a solitary, almost meditative practice. A single photograph can hold enormous narrative tension, like a frozen moment full of possible interpretations.

Books are another love. I make an artist’s book for almost every project. A book allows you to gather what doesn’t fit into the final artwork — research, interviews, peripheral stories — and give it a home. It’s also a way of preserving memory in its most intimate, tactile form. I even made two photobooks for my daughter’s first and third year as her birthday gifts,

Chinatown Cha-Cha is my first feature film. Film was the medium I always loved but never tried before. Unlike video installations, which can be experienced in fragments, cinema demands that an audience sit in a dark room and travel with you from beginning to end. That’s incredibly powerful and terrifying. When I started filming Chinatown Cha-Cha, I had no formal training. But the moment I reviewed the first day’s footage in Havana — we had brought over a dozen elderly Chinese American women to Cuba to perform with Cantonese opera singers in Havana’s Chinatown — I knew: this is a film, and I can do this. What I’ve learned is that each medium finds its own stories. Some stories demand the sustained intimacy of cinema; others need the stillness of a photograph or the layered structure of a book. I try to stay open and let the story tell me what form it needs.

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

Musically, my teenage years were shaped by everything from Fishmans to Boris and Bob Dylan. I chose the name “Luka” at fourteen after hearing Suzanne Vega’s song — partly because it’s a name that could be male or female, Eastern or Western. That ambiguity felt right. It still does.

In cinema, I’m deeply moved by filmmakers who blur the line between documentary and fiction, between the personal and the epic. Jim Jarmusch’s Night on Earth, Todd Haynes’ Velvet Goldmine, Agnès Varda’s The Gleaners and I, Wayne Wang’s Smoke, Kore-eda’s After Life, Kon Satoshi’s Millennium Actress— these are films I return to again and again. Varda showed me that a film could be at once rigorous and playful, deeply researched and deeply personal. Kon Satoshi blew my mind with how he collapses time. In photography, Jeff Wall’s theatrical staging of everyday moments influenced how I think about constructing images.

But the most profound influence in recent years has been the women I filmed — especially Coby Yee. Watching a 92-year-old woman live with such fearless vitality — still sewing her own costumes, still dancing, still loving — changed something in me permanently. When I was going through cancer treatment in 2023, I kept thinking of her: If Coby can live like that at 92, I can get through this. She taught me that persisting in what you love, even as everything around you fades, is in itself a form of resistance against the passage of life.

And then there’s my daughter. Becoming a mother shifted my entire perspective. Children live completely in the present — no phones, no social obligations, just pure immersion. That state of being reminded me of Coby in her later years, and it made me realize: Isn’t this the most essential way to be alive?

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

There have been many. Chinatown Cha-Cha took six years to complete — from the first research trip in 2018 to its theatrical release in China in November 2024. During that time, my father passed away in early 2019 — I had to put the film down for months because I simply couldn’t function. Then COVID hit and I couldn’t return to the US to continue filming. Then in 2020, Coby passed away suddenly — she had been dancing just a week before. A week after that, I discovered I was pregnant. Life and death, intertwined.

In 2023, I was diagnosed with lymphoma. Six rounds of chemotherapy, a tube running from my arm to my heart for half a year. Reading was painful, looking at a screen was painful. But I finished the film’s color grading before my first chemo session, and every time I was discharged, I’d immediately settle everyone’s wages. My producer kept worrying about me, but I couldn’t stay idle — I was probably the busiest patient in the ward.

What got me through was something I learned from Coby and the dancers: they were fighting against the disappearance of life itself. At their age, you’re constantly losing — physical strength, mobility, the perfection of your performance. But they kept showing up, kept dancing. That persistence is extraordinary.

After chemo, I flew to Japan within a month. People thought I was crazy. I said: A hymn to life! I can finally go outside! I don’t care if I have no hair — I’m free.

I’ve also faced the more structural challenge of being a non-film-school-trained artist entering the world of cinema, and of making a niche documentary viable for theatrical release in China. We almost gave up on getting the dragon seal — the theatrical distribution license — and considered just showing it at international festivals. But the overwhelming response to our trailer in China convinced us to push forward. A story about life force and intergenerational connection among overseas Chinese — why shouldn’t it be seen? The film went on to score 8.4 on Douban, was nominated by the China Film Directors’ Guild for its annual honors, and won Best New Documentary at the 14th China Documentary Academy Awards. When the Grant Avenue Follies dancers came to China for the screenings, audiences cheered for them every single time. Even at screenings where the dancers weren’t present, groups of women would get up and dance in the aisles afterward, sharing their own stories. Those moments confirmed that the film had become something larger than itself — a bridge, which is what I always hoped good work could be.

What projects are you currently working on, and what can we expect from you in the future?

I just published my book Dance in Herland (《她乡舞曲》), a companion publication to Chinatown Cha-Cha. It contains oral histories, archival photographs and documents from the golden age of Chinatown nightclubs, more complete life stories of Coby, Cynthia, and the other dancers, as well as reflections on Orientalism and the Chinese diaspora. The book also traces the research journey that led me to these women — from Anna May Wong to Esther Eng to the living dancers of the Grant Avenue Follies. For me, every project deserves a book. It’s where the research, the outtakes, and the stories that didn’t make it into the final work can find their place.

I also recently directed a documentary for ARC’TERYX’s Tune in Out There series, called She Goes With the Flow (《她 顺流而上》), which follows two female athletes — a high-altitude mountain guide training under the most rigorous international certification program, and a sixteen-year-old rock climber — exploring the concept of “flow state” in outdoor sports. It was my first time working on a sports-related film, and it opened up an entirely new world for me. Filming in the ice caves of Chamonix was one of the most beautiful natural experiences of my life — a place my usual creative path would never have taken me to. As someone without an outdoor sports background, I hope this film can serve as a bridge for audiences who aren’t outdoor enthusiasts, opening a door toward nature.

I’m currently working on a new project related to the Indonesian Chinese diaspora. After several years focused primarily on filmmaking, this project marks a return to the art world — I’m developing multi-channel video and textile works that continue my long-standing exploration of migration, memory, and identity, but through new materials and forms.

Beyond all of this, the most important thing in my life right now, alongside creation, is being a mother. My daughter has taught me more than I could have imagined. Through her open, curious gaze at the world, I feel like I’m growing up again alongside her. Many parents feel they’ve given their child the gift of life; I feel the opposite — being her mother is something I should be grateful for.

I hope to keep standing on a longer timeline, telling stories about people that transcend national borders and fixed frameworks. I want to carry a certain worldview — one that is fluid, inclusive, and boundary-crossing — into everything I make.

Text and photo courtesy of Luka Yuanyuan Yang 

Website: https://www.lukayangworks.com
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lukayang/