Xiao Yuhan
Xiao Yuhan – BA/BFA
From the gallows humour in hockey's toothless grins to the cartoonish effect in the CGI of dissolving tablets in vitamin commercials, my current practice investigates the conceptualization of health and illness enchanted by capitalist devices: the visual rhetoric, the aesthetic deliberation, the gimmick. By schematizing a nexus of manufactured, natural, and crafted materials, e.g. aeration stone, shark teeth, and Kaiju Skin*, I make three-dimensional works along with drawings to generate familiar shapes, diagrams, and imageries that construct our everyday perceptions. Informed by both personal experiences and collected anecdotes, my works demonstrate the tragicomic subordination of humans to the ultimate cure, fitness, and life extension in an often dichotomous pursuit of science/quackery, love/violence, stoicism/self-indulgence.
*Kaiju Skin is a material developed from my ongoing Kaiju Study.