NoFootsteps — Echo Youyi Yan

No Footsteps Return
RAINRAIN Gallery, 110 Lafayette Street, Suite 201, New York NY 10013
Curated by Chiarina Chen
July 11—August 9, 2025
Press Release
Checklist
Roundcube Contemporary: “The Cosmological Horror and Privilege of Existence”
Tussle Magazine: Slow Horror: A Way Back to Our Ability to Care
Cultbytes: This Week in NYC: Meditations on Horror, Celestial Interpretations, and a Dance Festival in Battery Park

From the curator Chiarina Chen:

Created for this exhibition, Echo Yan’s sculptural Screen shifts the lens to the ordinary home. Composed of pine, resin, lace tablecloths, and bits of household debris, this four-panel divider presents not a boundary but a zone of slow absorption. Across each panel, bodies blur into objects: limbs contort into chair legs, furniture sprouts skin, tools begin to breathe. The household swallows the figure until it’s no longer clear where one ends and the other begins. Her materials soften, bend, and cling, calmly staging the horror of the mundane. Here, metamorphosis is not explosive but held, erotically contained, folding struggle, ambiguity, and power into its own shape.

Screen
2025
Pine, Douglas fir, resin, lace tablecloth, metal, papier-mâché, epoxy clay, salt
69 x 70 x 25 inches

From Chunbum Park, Roundcube Contemporary:

“In Echo Youyi Yan’s “Screen” (2025), we see another manifestation of the posthumanist principle of belief that borders surrealism. Furniture arms serve as stretchers for veil-like fabric and stand on their own, developing feet-like bases made of plaster or paint-like accumulations. Can this be understood to be the final conclusion of the logic of the male gaze, which sees women as objects for viewing pleasure? Or is it just a terrible dream of finding oneself transformed into a piece of furniture? The furniture takes on an anthropomorphic quality, most likely being able to feel pain if it were broken into pieces by an external force. It is also asking us the question - are we being watched by the furniture and other objects, which come to life when we are not there? Is our reality basically just a literal interpretation of Toy Story? Are the objects equally subjects but we have failed to see their subjectivity due to its hidden nature beneath a facade of passivity?”

From Peiyue Wu, Tussle:

Echo Youyi Yan’s Screen, which at first looked like a decorative folding screen. But at its base, human feet began to emerge. The work examines how discipline and violence can manifest in the setting of a home. Chen referred to Ian McEwan’s novella First Love, Last Rites, in which a husband folds his wife into furniture, silencing her forever.

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