Interviews with Artists
Yao Mou In
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Interview by K.B Clear
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Published in September 2026
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But How Will I Eat Cake if my Head is Over There, and my Hands are Over Here?, Plastic, wax, foam, 110x30x30cm, 2026
Your work is highly charged emotionally. What is the emotional basis underlying your practice? Is it rage, despair, bitterness, elation, or something else?
I think it's a conflict between rage and compliance. I constantly struggle to find myself along that boundary.
A lot of that emotion comes from questioning what feminism means to me in relation to both Western and Eastern cultures. I'm also trying to understand the emotion I feel when I watch a really cute girl performing on stage and engaging with fan culture—the idealisation of a very ordinary human being. For some reason, I become incredibly emotional watching those performances.
A lot of my work is about understanding why I want to be both a believer and a performer at the same time.
Piping Dream II, plastic, oil, glitter on panel, 30x20cmYour work is linked to a highly specific digital culture. What is it about these online spaces that you want audiences to understand through your work?
I think imagination is never pure. Desire takes many different forms, and imagination and desire always come hand in hand. Whether fictional or real, the consequences of those desires exist online, and online spaces become these floating islands that we can interact with, even though they have very real consequences in everyday life.
I also want to tell people that it's okay to be addicted to the internet, and that escapism can also be a form of activism. Engaging with something in order to escape reality because you feel powerless or fragmented is a valid response. You're allowed to seek refuge in those spaces.
Lace Purgatory II, Oil on canvas, 82x87cm, 2025
Do you think your work is linked to feminism, or is that a lazy assumption?
It's a good question. I only find it lazy when I explain my practice to someone and they immediately conclude, "So you're a feminist."
Even feminism contains many different positions. In China, for example, feminism is an incredibly sensitive term online and often leads to intense arguments around gender. I don't think feminism has one fixed definition. I believe everyone should define it for themselves, and those differences are what make the conversation interesting.
I'm not trying to propose a definitive answer. I'm trying to open a dialogue about what feminism means to different people.
What has been the biggest struggle in helping Western audiences understand your work?
I think it's a lack of curiosity—but I also think that's a global issue.
The question is: how far are you willing to understand something that has no obvious connection to your own experience? And how much do I have to perform in order to make you curious enough to engage with it?
I struggle with the performativity of explaining my work. I want it to be accessible and to reach people, but I also find myself in a position where the more I explain, the more I risk exoticising myself. That's something I think about constantly.
how to forget you have a body, 7’04, 2024How institutionalised do you think your practice is? Is institutionalisation something that concerns you?
It is a concern for me.
I've described institutions as being caught in a kind of cycle of performing community. Often there's a performative element to community-building within institutions. To me, if you genuinely want to build a community, you can simply do it—you don't necessarily need an institution to validate that process.
Because of that, I've started thinking carefully about what "institution" means in my own practice, and I've tried to avoid reproducing its aesthetics and habits. That includes highly coded visual languages, untouchable ways of engaging with art, or overly intellectualised ways of discussing theory in relation to practice.
Vomitorium, wax, paper and plastic on panel, 110x80cm, 2026How concerned are you about shock value in your work?
To be honest, I used to think about shock value much more. Because I work with intense imagery so often, I've become fairly desensitised to it myself.
Shock is part of the work, but I don't want the work to be limited to shock alone. I also want there to be care, thoughtfulness, and the lingering feeling you get after watching a really good horror film.
I think the strongest works often contain an element of creepiness. That's something I deliberately try to channel. Creepiness lingers. It makes people uncomfortable without pushing them so far away that they disengage.
There's one artwork I really love where a man is hidden underneath a slope, masturbating while people unknowingly walk above him. To me, that's an incredible example of creepiness because it completely destabilises the boundary between artist and viewer. Shock can often be one-directional, whereas creepiness creates a more complicated relationship that stays with you.
Do you think your work would be interpreted very differently if you were a man?
I think about this question more and more.
I used to believe that art exists as a conversation between the artist and the viewer, and in that relationship gender inevitably matters because it shapes the context in which the work is made. But if I truly believe in the work itself, perhaps I don't need to be present at all. Perhaps the viewer can develop their own conversation with it independently of me.
Context is important, but it's a difficult question.
If I saw a work very similar to mine made by a man, I think I would care—especially if it were made by a straight, conventionally masculine man. But rather than dismissing it because of his gender, I would want to ask why. What experiences led him there?
For me, my work comes from struggling with patriarchal representations of desire and questioning what female desire looks like in relation to those structures. Rather than reducing that conversation to gender, I'd rather talk about desire itself—why certain images become the best representation of someone's desires, regardless of who they are.
Self-portrait in ahegao face, 30x28cm, Mixed media on canvas, 2025
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If you like this why not read our interview with José García Oliva.
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