By: Chenyang Nie
Luyao Chang is a multidisciplinary artist born in Japan and raised in China. Her practice moves fluidly between sculpture, installation, and moving image, weaving together reason and intuition, playfulness and unease, the personal and the structural. Through her evolving artistic language, she draws viewers into spaces of deep reflection—where perception, memory, and the often-invisible systems that shape our lives are brought into focus.
In the earlier stages of her career, Luyao’s work was largely concept-driven. She tackled broad political themes with clarity, often articulating them through the use of symbolic materials and carefully structured forms. However, over time, she began to feel an internal dissonance. Within these rigid conceptual frameworks, emotion and intuition became compressed, the self gradually sidelined. The process of creation started to feel like a steady depletion of mental and emotional energy. This realization prompted a profound shift in her approach. Moving away from pure conceptualism, she began to embrace a more intuitive, sensory-led mode of making—one that welcomed spontaneity and emotional resonance. It was during this transitional period that she discovered ceramics, a material that would become central to her practice. Its sensitivity, unpredictability, and tactile immediacy aligned with her desire to create works that felt more embodied, more personally connected, and more open to dialogue between artist, material, and viewer.
Her representative work On the Warm Bed exemplifies what she calls a “dislocated aesthetic.” At first glance, the installation’s vibrant colors, whimsical clay forms, and use of capsule toys appear joyful and lighthearted, evoking the visual language of childhood. Yet beneath this surface lies a quiet disturbance: sealed human hearts, strands of hair, deformed limbs. These unsettling elements hint at a deeper, hidden violence—one not imposed through force, but embedded within everyday structures such as education, domestic space, and institutional order. The “warm bed,” then, becomes a fertile environment that promotes the growth of unwelcome elements in ways too subtle to notice.
Luyao frequently employs familiar yet uncanny symbols—chains, toys, fragmented bodies—to construct perceptual dissonance between what we see and what we sense. These objects serve as entry points into layered metaphorical systems: the chain embodies both connection and constraint; the toy-like structure suggests play but also enforces hierarchy; the distorted and broken body speaks to both personal vulnerability and the dehumanizing processes of societal structuring. Many of her participatory installations involve what she describes as “pre-designed freedom,” where viewers believe they are freely engaging, yet are subtly guided along carefully constructed paths. This controlled spontaneity reflects the very mechanisms of systemic regulation her work aims to expose. Material, especially ceramic, plays a vital and active role in her process. Far from being a passive vehicle for expression, Luyao treats material as a living collaborator. Ceramics, with its sensitivity to temperature, humidity, and even the artist’s emotional state, becomes a medium that resists total control—bringing its own agency into the creative process. In some works, the material itself takes on a narrative role, leading the direction of the piece rather than simply serving its concept.
At the philosophical core of Luyao’s practice is a notion of “non-binary” thinking—an idea that extends beyond gender or identity to encompass a more fundamental challenge to binary logic itself. Her work continually seeks to dismantle and reconfigure established structures of thought and perception. Recurring motifs such as severed limbs, organs, and structural components hover in a space between body and architecture, the organic and the mechanical. This fluid boundary evokes a deeply held belief, inspired by Eastern philosophy: that interior and exterior, self and world, are one and the same. This inclusive, integrative vision also extends to her audience. Luyao resists targeting a specific demographic; her works are open to viewers of all ages and backgrounds. What matters most to her is not who engages with the work, but whether it can ignite a shared emotional response—something that transcends identity, language, or social context. She is especially interested in the mechanisms behind the formation of collective memory, and hopes her work can become part of a living archive of contemporary experience—both documenting and contributing to the emotional and cultural consciousness of our time.
Luyao Chang’s practice is an ongoing exploration of hidden structures, suppressed memories, and the subtle forces that shape human experience. With a voice that is tender yet unflinching, she challenges systems of discipline and forgetting. Her work builds a universe shaped by displacement, memory, control, and the longing for freedom—a world where softness is not fragility, but strength, and where tenderness becomes a radical form of resistance.
