Kexin Yang
(she/her)
How can invisible forces become visible through material, movement and space?
Kexin Yang’s practice explores the ways bodies and materials are shaped by forces that are often difficult to see.
Working across sculpture, installation and moving image, she is drawn to states of flow, pressure, suspension and transformation. Water recurs throughout her practice as both image and material reference — a surface that reflects, divides, connects and shifts between different states.
Yang works with steel, resin, light and projection, allowing traces of cutting, heating, bending and casting to remain visible. Rather than concealing these processes, she treats them as evidence of movement and pressure held within the material.
Her recent work expands from questions of bodily control towards wider forces such as gravity, memory, time and flow, creating spaces in which solid forms appear temporarily unsettled, suspended between stillness and change.
A Lifted Water Surface
A Lifted Water Surface considers water as a threshold between stability and movement, visibility and disappearance. The work begins with the idea of lifting a fragment of water from the ground and holding it temporarily in space.
Bent and plasma-cut steel carries traces of heat, pressure and movement, while transparent resin interrupts the solidity of the structure. Projected images of water pass across the work and surrounding walls, shifting the sculpture through light, shadow and reflection.
The installation explores how forces such as gravity, flow and time continue to shape material, even when movement appears to have been held still.
A Lifted Water Surface, 2026. Steel, resin and projected moving image.
A Lifted Water Surface, 2026. Detail of steel, resin and projected moving image.
A Lifted Water Surface, 2026. Detail of steel, resin and projected moving image.
A Lifted Water Surface, 2026. Detail of steel and resin, with wall-mounted work in the background.
A Lifted Water Surface, 2026. Detail of plasma-cut steel, transparent resin and projected moving image.
A Lifted Water Surface, 2026. Detail of plasma-cut steel and heat traces.
A Lifted Water Surface, 2026. Wall-mounted plasma-cut steel fragments.
A Lifted Water Surface, 2026. Detail of plasma-cut steel and heat traces.
Projected moving image used within A Lifted Water Surface, 2026.
Before It Settles
This work explores a moment between movement and stillness.
A sheet of steel is cut, bent and folded into a shallow, wave-like form. Traces of heat, pressure and making remain visible across its surface, while a transferred image interrupts the metal and shifts between image, reflection and object.
Rather than representing water directly, the work holds onto the suggestion of movement — as if a passing flow has been briefly fixed in place.
Before It Settles, 2026. Folded steel with image transfer and plasma-cut details.
Before It Settles, 2026. Folded steel with image transfer and plasma-cut details.
Before It Settles, 2026. Detail of image transfer and plasma-cut steel.
Before It Settles, 2026. Detail of plasma-cut steel and heat traces.