Echo Youyi Yan

Installation photos from my duo show—Feeding the Load, Regulated Dosage—with @cass.yao at @frisson_gallery Feb 19th - Apr 4th, 2026! So grateful that Rui @secretary37_ bought us together so that I can share my most recent works with you all 🪵🪵🪵🪵🪵🪵🪵🪵 Since I got into RISD, I started creating spatial works to further investigate the domestication concepts. In the show, I wanted to make the physical fences function as both sculptural and curatorial devices. They choreograph movement through the exhibition space—guiding, constraining, and taming the act of looking itself. 🐏🐏🐏🐏🐏🐏🐏🐏 A slice from the heartfelt curatorial written by Rui, the most hardworking curator: “The body does not belong to itself. It is gnawed on by history, sucked dry by function, fattened for slaughter, hollowed for utility. It is an ecosystem of contradictions: a vessel that mutates, decays, heals, betrays, and conspires against itself. A body is never just a body—it is a site of trespass, of forces embedding themselves into muscle, seeping into the marrow, whispering instructions from within. What remains is not flesh but a structure built to withstand, to accommodate, to endure.“ Thank you @pa_secas and @da_kuzi for allowing us to show in such a spectacular space! Thank you my boi @cass.yao for presenting your wonderfully sublime art and brain with me, and for taking such beautiful documentation of our show!

The Armory Show opens today! Find us at Booth P29, where we’re presenting “Muttering Burrow, “ featuring new works by Kosuke Kawahara and Echo Youyi Yan. Both artists explore transformation and evolution, probing whether change inherently signifies progress—or something more ambivalent. @thearmoryshow @teppennisiri @echooooyan

That’s a wrap ✨ Thank you to everyone who joined us last night for As If Seen Before, the RISD MFA Sculpture First Year Final Show! The exhibition brings together sculpture, scent, sound, installation, assemblage, and performance, and explored how memory, repetition, and fragments of experience can create moments that feel both familiar and difficult to place. We’re so thankful for everyone who spent time with the work, shared conversations, and brought such great energy to the space throughout the evening! Special thanks to curator April (@threestonesal ) for thoughtfully shaping the exhibition, graduate director Taylor (@baldwints ) for always showing up for us throughout the year; Rembrandt(@rembrandtscooking )for the master-level catering and @accordionstudiospvd for this wonderful venue! First year sculptors include: Margeaux Abeyta @my.mar.mar Echo Youyi Yan @echooooyan Jenna Clouse @jennaclousestudio Ying Ye @ye_ying_ye Megita Denton @ablefarmspdx Olivia Saporito @liv_sap Rey Reyes @_mugremariposa_ Sunho Lee @sunhno Photos by @echooooyan

Moon bread

🪱 Crumbs, 2026, installation with performance Casually photographed by @w.h_h.u

Last call!! Final two days of Feeding The Load, Regulated Dosage at @frisson_gallery 🐁 Thank you @secretary37_ for making the show even possible and for bringing me and @cass.yao ’s works together Big love to the gallery @da_kuzi @pa_secas for making the space for this show to exist the way! And! We got some amazing press (!!) 4 publications wrote about the show! Thank you to the brilliant writers @jonahjames.r @peiyue_jess @patbellart @papermagazine Come through if you haven’t yet—last chance to see it 👀

Performance at FRISSON, NY @frisson_gallery on March 12, 2026! Thanks to everyone who came joining us in this wonderful night! I’m beyond honored to have such talented performers creating soul-shattering sound and movements inside my Fence installation! Thank you 🎺Qiujiang Levi Lu (@levi.lu1 ), 🩰 Madison Wada (@____homesick____4 ), and 🪈Hideo Rakudou (@rakudoan )! You really bought life to the works! My show with @cass.yao , curated by @secretary37_ will be up until April 4, 2026 Thank you @mengtiian for filming the videos. #nycart #sculpture #dance #performance #frisson

Fence后遗症

Introducing 1st year MFA Sculpture Candidate, Echo Youyi Yan! Echo Youyi Yan @echooooyan (b.2000, Chongqing, China) is a sculptor based in Providence, RI and New York City, NY. She is currently an MFA Sculpture candidate at the Rhode Island School of Design, and holds a BFA in Studio Art at New York University with a minor in Philosophy. She has exhibited at FRISSON; The Armory Show 2025; RAINRAIN; Eli Klein Gallery; Gelman Gallery at the RISD Museum; Sotheby’s Institute of Art; Zepster Gallery;Chambers Fine Art; LATITUDE Gallery; DeCA Foundation; Light Up Globals Project Space; Accent Sisters; theBLANC Art Space; The Compound; Stilllife Art Fair; Commons Gallery at New York University; 80WSE Gallery; Rosenberg Gallery at New York University. Yan’s practice centers around the domestication of animals and humans. She believes this evolutionary force has shaped the physical bodies and constructed social interactions. In her recent practice, Yan tries to domesticate her viewers’ body and mind, using physical barriers as a curatorial tool that guide, restrict, and choreograph movement through the space. “For me, sculpture is irreplaceable in its ability to embody force. Evolution and domestication, as I see it, are collisions of forces. The mutation of bodily forms is the result of external forces, which themselves are produced through alienation.” - The artist crawls through You May Touch The Fence, 2025, installation Exhibition view: Feeding the Load, Regulated Dosage, FRISSON Gallery, New York, 2026 (white sculpture by Cass Yao) Screen, 2025, Pine, Douglas fir, resin, lace tablecloth, metal, papier-mâché, epoxy clay, salt, 69” x 70” x 25” Exhibition view: At-Will Adaptation Eli Klein Gallery, New York, 2024 The Spinner, 2025, Raw wool, antique spinning wheel, pine, resin, epoxy clay, 79” × 60” × 22” Civilized Paradox, 2023, Douglas Fir, Synthetic Fur, Electronic Parts, Single Channel Video, Sound, 25” x 8” x 48” Please Do Not Feed!, 2022, stained clear pine, resin, PVA glue, ten whale tail plushies, cotton, metal hook, stainless steel, pencil on panels, 48” x 30” x 84”

Echo Yan (@echooooyan ) Birdsong 2025 Alpaca hair, Indonesian birdcage, glass, pine resin 28 x 11x 7 in. 71.12 x 27.94 x 17.78 cm. Feeding the Load, Regulated Dosage is on view through April 4th. Visit us at 141 Attorney Street Tuesday through Saturday 11 am to 6 pm

Echo Yan’s (@echooooyan ) work gnaws at the slow violence of domestication, where bodies do not break but soften—rounded, dulled, folded into furniture, tamed into usability. A body adapts, conforms, and forfeits its edges, but the act of yielding is itself a burden, a pressure that sinks into bone and muscle. In her work, the line between life and object collapses—flesh becomes a passive structure, while objects grow eerie appendages of sentience. This is the posthuman recursion: the chair and the body, the egg and the organism, the organic and the synthetic—each absorbing, metabolizing, and reforming into the other. A chair sprouts thorns, rendering it uninhabitable. An egg, fragile and trembling, is both a vessel of life and a pre-packaged commodity, its smooth surface concealing the brutal mechanics of reproduction and control. Limbs retract, not in fear, but in reconfiguration; spines reorient toward the ground, not in submission, but as an evolution into new architecture. A body does not have to be upright to be alive. A body does not have to be human to move. Feeding the Load, Regulated Dosage opens this Thursday, February 19th with a reception from 6 pm to 9 pm. -Images- Birdsong 2025 Alpaca hair, Indonesian birdcage, glass, pine, resin 28 × 11 × 7 in. 71.12 × 27.94 × 17.78 cm. The Spinner 2025 Raw wool, antique spinning wheel, pine, resin, epoxy clay Dimensions variable

You May Touch The Fence, 2025