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, 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.
Before I was born,
I was already inside another body.
Perhaps this is why we keep building enclosures around us, shaping and being shaped by the spaces we inhabit.
Echo Youyi Yan’s practice begins with domestication, which she sees less as a completed condition than as an ongoing negotiation between bodies and the forces that shape them. Evolution, architecture, and intimate relationships all produce forms. A body bends beneath a roof, learns to follow a corridor, or repeats a gesture until instruction becomes instinct. Yan is interested in the moment when an external force no longer needs to announce itself.
Her work draws on the theory of human self-domestication, which suggests that human social environments have shaped our evolution by favoring traits such as cooperation and tolerance. She uses this theory to play with socially constructed power dynamics and create creature-like sculptures.
Yan makes sculptures from carved wood, found furniture, household objects, silicone, and metal, materials that carry different histories of use and bodily contact. A rigid piece of lumber may be carved until it is softer than her calloused hands. A domestic object may become attached to a biomorphic form until it is unclear whether it functions as a prosthesis, restraint, or organ. These encounters are sometimes violent and sometimes nurturing. Yan is interested in their ambiguity. Domestication does not operate through violence alone. To tame something can also mean to feed, to shelter, to care.
Yan domesticates her viewers’ bodies and psyches, using physical fences and barriers as sculptural and curatorial tools that guide, restrict, and choreograph movement through space. Visitors must crawl, bend, or peer through barriers like animals to encounter the works. In her performances, she also explores how bodies learn to obey, resist, or negotiate the structures around them. Yan is interested in passive structures that make the body behave without directly commanding it. The most effective instruction may not look like an instruction at all. It can appear as an opening just large enough to crawl through or a pathway that gently redirects the feet. The viewer appears to move voluntarily, while the environment has already written part of the choreography.