Feeding the Load, Regulated Dosage
Cass Yao, Echo Youyi Yan
Curated by Rui Jiang
FRISSON Gallery
141 Attorney St, New York, NY
February 19 - April 4, 2026
Press Release and Checklist
Asian American Arts Alliance: ““Feeding the Load” Confronts the Body’s Long History of Being Shaped”
Paper Magazine: “The PAPER Guide to Downtown's Best Spring Art Shows”
Two Coats of Paint: “Echo Yan and Cass Yao: An unsettled awareness”
Whitehot Magazine of Contemporary Art: “Confronting the Abject; Feeding the Load, Regulated Dosage at FRISSON”
White floor sculpture by Cass Yao
Three wall scuptures by Cass Yao
From Peiyue Wu, Asian American Arts Alliance
“To be alive is to undergo an endless process of adaptation. This process can unfold across scales, from environmental collapse and species response, to the body’s gradual pathologization, to the survival pressures imposed by patriarchy, colonial restructuring, and migrant life.”
From Patrick Ryan Bel, Two Coats of Paint
“Curator Rui Jiang has paid attention to the structures with which bodies interact. Fences, coat racks, traps, and cages are not neutral. They separate, hold, contain, and discipline. Yan’s You May Touch the Fence is made up of slatted barrier curves and bends around the gallery. In one section, it forms a U-shaped enclosure, creating a small interior zone at once inviting and terminal. A ribbed, spiraling form hangs like a stalactite at its center above a calcified antique-looking object on the floor.”
Left sculpture by Cass Yao
From the curator Rui Jiang
“Mutation is not a choice; it is an inevitability, a force without a face, an appetite without a master. It slithers through the bones of species and individuals alike, feeding on repetition, on need, on the quiet violence of adaptation. A body bends—because it must, because the pressure is ceaseless, because stillness is death. But in the bending, something else occurs: a mutation that escapes its captors, a crack that refuses to close, an organism that shifts, twists, and, in its disobedience, breeds something new. The body is not a sculpture but a wound that will not scar over, an opening where power and resistance knot together in an unholy, unending embrace. Here, in the grotesque mess of transformation, nothing is fixed, and nothing is free.”
“Echo Yan’s 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.”
“Increasing this tension between utility and ruin is Yan’s The Spinner, an antique spinning wheel so entangled in its own thread that its function becomes undiscernible. The white foamy material that appears across several of Yan’s works simulates something akin to bile, rabid froth, and industrial discharge. The domestic labor envisioned here is not neat and efficient but sickly and excessive.”
- Patrick Ryan Bell
“In Birdsong (2025), a readymade birdcage from Indonesia becomes a vessel through which Yan traces the entanglement of patriarchy and colonial history. In Javanese culture, an idealized masculinity has been summarized through the possession of house, wife, horse, dagger, and bird, with birds serving as markers of status. Under Dutch colonial rule, the bird trade expanded dramatically, spreading from elite circles to the broader urban middle class, while rare species were exported to Europe.”
- Peiyue Wu
“In Weresheep (2025), what first appears to be a standing coat rack reveals itself as something more unsettling. The hooks take the form of sheep horns, the central pole carries the texture of a spine, and the three supporting legs resemble both animal hooves and slippered human feet. The work collapses distinctions between human, domesticated animal, and object, suggesting a condition in which bodies are trained, instrumentalized, and fixed into place.”
- Peiyue Wu
“Weresheep is an especially clear expression of Yan’s interest in domestic objects. The work resembles a coat rack with hooved feet and hooks that read as ram-like horns: it’s an absurd, faintly menacing object that appears frozen in mid-transformation. It’s a hybridization, but between beast and object instead of beast and human, reflecting the artist’s apprehension of humans as self-domesticated animals. ”
- Patrick Ryan Bell
“Yan’s Lumber Remembers Being a Tree touches on the idea of inanimate objects retaining memory. The wood here is distressed, purple and black with veins of tan that pop against the darker background. A platform covered in the white foamy substance juts out, holding a form made of dark, charred wood as if it were an object of reverence, backed by a mirror with a tall and slender pointed arch. The mirror is obscured, but reveals hints of reflection that reward the viewer for intimate time spent”
- Patrick Ryan Bell
“Sometimes the absurdity and unease lean towards the humorous. Mickey Mouse Clubhousecontemplates a flattened on the street, with a mouse trap embedded like an internal organ and a cast gummy bear as bait. Yan connects this piece to unintentional domestication, noting that urban animals like rats are remade by the food waste left behind by humans. The sculpture may be the only overtly funny work in the show, but it is not necessarily lighthearted. The roadkill quality of the form and the vestigial, vertebrae-like tail keep the piece from being cute. ”
- Patrick Ryan Bell
The Evening of Performance
On Mar 12th, 2026, we invited performers and sound artists to create interpretive performances around the installations.
“To activate the installations and intensify the bodily experience for visitors, the exhibition also hosted an evening of performances. In the opening act, Qiujiang Levi Lu used vibration sensors held inside the mouth to transduce the body’s interior tremors into sound, producing an incantatory sound art that evoked primitive tribal ceremony. In the second performance, Madison Wada entered the fenced enclosure, negotiating its boundaries through movement before retrieving one of Yao’s bone-like sculptures, The Spore (2025), from the ground. Accompanied by Hideo Rakudou’s flute, Wada’s dance explored how the body submits to, resists, and is ultimately reshaped by structure.”
- Peiyue Wu
Featuring Qiujiang Levi Lu's sound;
Madison Wada's movement;
and Hideo Rakudou's flute performance.
Videos are filmed by Meng Tian (ins: @maoshiyii) and edited by Echo Youyi Yan
Previous Page Next Page