Solo Exhibition, Steel Garden, ShanghART Gallery, Singapore, 13 Dec 2025 - 15 Feb 2026

Steel Garden

钢铁花园

13 December 2025 - 15 February 2026

Opening: 13 Dec 2025, 4pm

Adress: ShanghART Singapore

9 Lock Road, #02-22

Gillman Barracks

Singapore 108937

At the heart of the exhibition is Steel Garden, her latest two-channel video installation. The work draws from the grand floral displays erected annually during moments of national celebration.

Through a series of precise and lingering images-close-ups of flowers, birds foraging among cracks, weeds growing between paving stones, the varied postures of visitors, and the synchronised gesture of crowds during the flag-raising ceremony-Yao reveals the subtle relationships between individual action, collective ritual, and the constructed natural landscape.

This multi-chapter video work begins with news reports on specially cultivated festival flowers and culminates in a floating, dust-like vocal poem from the artist's own perspective. Drawing upon the concepts of the "moving garden" and the "third landscape" by French gardener Gilles Clément, the work also references descriptions of pains and hallucination experienced by the soldier Pavel Korchagin in the Soviet novel How the Steel Was Tempered to reveal the bipolitical framework that underlies this monumental ritual.

The exhibition brings together works spanning more than 10 years, offering a contextual understanding of Yao's sustained inquiry into symbolic gesture, embodied practice, and moving-image construction. Beginning with early public space interventions and documented performances, Yao initially used video as a means of recording her embodied actions. Over time, she has increasingly turned toward filmic construction, developing a more deliberate cinematic language that positions her both in front of and behind the camera.

More information: https://www.shanghartgallery.com/galleryarchive/exhibition.htm?exbId=18282