Xiaojing Yan

Lives and works in Toronto, ON, Canada

Artist statement

My practice investigates how living systems and materials formed by them can act as sculptural collaborators. Working across installation, cultivation, and immersive environments, I create conditions in which matter accumulates, binds, decays, and transforms in ways I can initiate but not fully control. Nature is not represented as a subject; it participates in determining the work. I work with pine needles, freshwater pearls, Lingzhi mushrooms, and cicada exuviae. Each material carries cultural memory while following its own physical or biological logic. Rather than illustrating tradition, these materials determine scale, structure, labor, and time. They resist complete control, introduce contingency, and make duration visible. This approach is informed by a Daoist relational worldview, in which reality emerges through dynamic interdependence rather than fixed hierarchy. That lineage appears not as iconography but as structure. Transformation is not a theme; it is a condition of the work. In Spirit Cloud and Mountain of Pines, thousands of pearls or pine needles accumulate into forms that oscillate between organism and landscape. In my Lingzhi sculptures, I construct an armature and establish conditions for cultivation, but the mycelium gradually binds and reshapes the form according to its own growth. Authorship becomes distributed. I step back, and the sculpture continues to evolve. In The Underground Sun, this logic expands from object to landscape: native plants...

Artwork