Artist’s studio in Bushwick, Brooklyn, 2024
Echo Youyi Yan (b.2000, Chongqing, China) is a sculptor based in New York City, NY and Providence, RI. 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 (New York, 2026), The Compound (Baltimore, 2025); Gelman Gallery at the RISD Museum (Providence, 2026 2025); RAINRAIN (New York, 2025), Eli Klein Gallery (New York, 2024); Zepster Gallery (Brooklyn, 2024); DeCA Foundation (New York, 2024); Light Up Globals Project Space, (New York, 2024); Accent Sisters, (Jersey City, 2024); theBLANC Art Space, (New York, 2023); Sotheby’s Institute of Art, (New York, 2023); LATITUDE Gallery, (New York, 2023); Chambers Fine Art (New York, 2023); Stilllife Art Fair (New York, 2023); Commons Gallery at New York University (New York, 2023); 80WSE Gallery (New York, 2023); Rosenberg Gallery at New York University(New York, 2023); among others. Yan has received reviews and interviews from Roundcube Contemporary, Impulse Magazine, Tussle Magazine, Cultbytes, and White Hot Magazine, and has given talks at New York University’s BFA Alumni panel.
We are nothing more than the traces of colliding forces.
Echo Youyi Yan’s sculptural practice intertwines evolutionary biology and eroticism, engaging with transgressive forces that provoke physical metamorphosis within processes of domestication. Her works resemble hybrid creatures in states of tension as they stretch, expand, and fracture. Drawing on museological and taxidermic aesthetics, Yan critiques humanity’s impulse to classify, display, and manipulate living beings and objects. In her recent works, she extends this inquiry toward the viewer by building physical enclosures that seek to domesticate their bodies and minds.
Yan’s practice centers around the history of domestication of animals and humans. She believes this evolutionary force shaped the physical bodies, as well as constructed social interactions.
She also extends the concept of "domestication" to “domesticity,” viewing the creation of furniture as a way to tame surroundings. By mutating and binding found furniture, kitchen utensils, and other household tools into organic forms, she questions whether utility is a necessary prerequisite for life.
The artist makes sculptures in a way that is simultaneously sadistic and nurturing. She violently chisels rigid lumber into biomorphic forms, then coats it in resin that resembles bodily fluids. Recently, Yan has begun carefully scraping away portions of the resin to reveal the raw wood beneath. This act of excavation mirrors the archaeological process, unveiling layers of the past. At last, she binds found household objects with her wood carvings, as if enacting a form of selective breeding. These assemblages bear traces of taming and resistance, fragments of intimate narratives that are re-imagined into new forms through a process of domestication.
For Yan, sculpture is irreplaceable in its ability to embody force. Evolution and domestication, as she sees it, are collisions of forces. The mutation of bodily forms is the result of external forces, which themselves are produced through alienation. Power may manifest directly, or may also operate more subtly in reciprocal relationships. Yan explores dominance and submission by materializing these forces through forms such as the pulling of an umbilical cord, suggestive strokes of the tail, or the penetration of dinnerware. The supple flexibility of wire and silicone grapples with the rigidity of metal and wood. In these works, opposing forces achieve a precarious balance, seeming resolved but never fully canceling one another out.
Her sculptures invite the home-bred humans to reflect on their primal lust, corporal fragility, and the paradoxical nature of the forces residing within them.