TheArmoryShow2025 — Echo Youyi Yan

Muttering Burrow
The Armory Show 2025
Kosuke Kawahara, Youyi Echo Yan
Presented with RAINRAIN, Booth P29, Javits Center
September 5th—7th, 2025
Fair Info

Paintings by Kosuke Kawahara

Muttering Burrow

For this year’s Armory presentation, Muttering Burrow, Echo Youyi Yan continues her exploration of domestication and domesticity, investigating how subtle pressures transform organic beings into utilitarian objects.

In this new body of work, the sculptures are rooted in fairy-tale narratives, where these motifs enliven the domestic and reveal the uncanny life that lingers within familiar forms. In Muttering Burrow, the piece that shares its title with the presentation, an unidentifiable animal bone is nestled within a hollow wooden stump, evoking the leap into a rabbit hole and the continual unmaking of bodily identity. Lumber Remembers Being a Tree presents a human-shaped wooden form gazing into a deteriorated mirror, reflecting a body worn down by utility and memory. Weresheep, a spine-like hanger crowned with twisted horns, reimagines lycanthropy in reverse, transforming a creature through submission and timidity rather than feral strength. Finally, in The Spinner, a fractured spinning wheel tethered by raw wool to a wall-mounted creature stages an interplay of maker and made.

Across these works, fairy-tale references illuminate the intimate and often unsettling relationship between creatures and their domestic environments, showing how transformation, constraint, and care coexist within the structures we inhabit.

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Muttering Burrow
2025
Unidentified animal bone, pine, resin, salt
36 × 4 × 7.5 in (91.44 × 10.16 × 19.05 cm)

Lumber Remembers Being A Tree
2025
Pine, antique mirror, epoxy clay, resin
29 × 10.5 × 5.5 in (73.66 × 26.67 × 13.97 cm)

Weresheep
2025
Rubberwood, Resin, epoxy clay, paper clay
70.5 x 18.5 x 18.5 in (179.07 × 46.99 × 46.99 cm)

The Spinner
2025
Raw wool, antique spinning wheel, pine, resin, epoxy clay
Installation spread: 79" H (on wall) × 60" W (floor) × 22" D (floor)
Wall sculpture: 27" H × 7" W × 5" D
Floor sculpture: 32" H × 41" W × 14" D