Introduction

Yao Qingmei (born in 1982 in Zhejiang) currently lives and works in Paris. Her practice focuses primarily on performance,  video and related installation, incorporating elements of scenography, costumes, texts, lectures, games, sound poetry, and contemporary choreography. By intervening in specific spaces, she disrupts established rules, explores the symbols of everyday life, and examines how bodies nurtured by these symbols gain or lose power, breaking the boundaries between performance and its setting.

Her works often use displacement, metaphor, and allegory to question the mechanisms of political and social issues, revealing a tension of confrontation rooted in serious critique yet tinged with burlesque and lightness. She seeks to stimulate collisions between different modes of language, body movements, and perspectives by exploring the loosening of the body and the unique spontaneity of the individual, thus touching the interstices of established frameworks and seeking forms of resistance.

Yao Qingmei entered École Nationale Supérieure d'Art de Limoges In 2007, and graduated in 2013 from  École Nationale Supérieure d’Art de Villa Arson Nice with DNSEP (Master) degree in Fine Arts. In 2014, she won the Jury Special Award at the 59th Salon de Montrouge and received the AIC Individual Creation Fund from the Limousin region in France. In 2017, she won the inaugural Porsche “Young Chinese Artist of the Year” award in Shanghai. In 2018, she was selected and awarded the 68th "Jeune Création" Prize in Paris. In 2022, she received the Asian Cultural Council New York Fellowship and the AIC Individual Creation Fund from the Île-de-France region.
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Yao Qingmei has held solo exhibitions at  Palais de Tokyo in Paris and the West Bund Museum in Shanghai, and has exhibited and performed at institutions such as  Whitechapel Gallery in the UK, Haus der Kunst in Munich, Shanghai Biennale, Biennial of Jeune Création européenne, Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature, Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing, Musée d'art contemporain de la Haute-Vienne, and Para Site in Hong Kong. Her works are part of public and private collections, including Fonds Municipal d'Art Contemporain de la Ville de Paris, Direction des Affaires Culturelles de la Ville de Marseille, Guangdong Museum of Art, Taikang Space in Beijing, Kadist Art Foundation in San Francisco, and other institutions.