ISCP Talk, Yao Qingmei in Conversation with Xiaoyu Weng, September 15, 2026, 6:30–7:30pm, New York
For this Artists at Work talk, ISCP artist-in-residence Yao Qingmei will be joined by curator Xiaoyu Weng. They will discuss the development of Yao’s performance and moving-image practice, from early works in which she used her own body to intervene in everyday reality to her evolving engagement with performers and the camera, and with the embodied presence of the audience. They will also consider her interest in rehearsal, repetition, and bodily control, and how these relate to labor and vulnerability. A Q&A with the audience will follow.
Yao Qingmei is an artist based between Paris and Wenzhou, China, who works across video, performance, and installation. Her practice stages situations that are both choreographed and susceptible to breakdown, in which bodies confront systems of rules and constraint. Drawing on cinematic language, physical gestures, and scenographic frameworks, she explores the tension between control and instability and moments in which vulnerability emerges as the body slips beyond imposed structures. Through this approach, she transforms everyday actions into performative frameworks that expose and unsettle power dynamics and collective forms. Yao has exhibited work at Centre Pompidou, Paris; West Bund Museum, Shanghai; and Palais de Tokyo, Paris, among others.
Based in New York and Kassel, Germany, Xiaoyu Weng is co-curating the upcoming Documenta 16. She is also director of the newly relaunched Art in General in New York. From 2021-2023, she was Head of the Modern and Contemporary Art department at the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO) in Toronto, Canada. Previously, she served as Associate Curator at the Solomon R. Guggenheim in New York, where she curated exhibitions including Tales of Our Time (2016–17) and One Hand Clapping(2018), exploring the responses of Chinese artists to globalization. Weng also curated the fifth Ural Industrial Biennial in 2018–19 in Yekaterinburg, and from 2010 to 2015, she held the position of director and curator of Asia Programs at Kadist Art Foundation, Paris and San Francisco.
This program is supported by Centre national des arts plastiques (CNAP); ShanghART Gallery; Bloomberg Philanthropies; Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso; Hartfield Foundation; James Rosenquist Foundation; Marion Boulton “Kippy” Stroud Foundation; Milton and Sally Avery Arts Foundation; New York City Council District 34; New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council; New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature; Robert Rauschenberg Foundation; van Beuren Charitable Foundation; and William Talbott Hillman Foundation.
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