Introduction

Wang Yiyi was born in 1988 in Nanjing. She graduated from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2011 with a bachelor's degree and from the University of Pennsylvania in 2015 with a master's degree. She currently lives and works in Shanghai.

Wang Yiyi’s multidisciplinary practice spans the cultivation of unconventional plants and fungi, ceramic-centered mixed-media sculptures, as well as video and photography. Whereas conventional engagements with nature often position humans as observers— processing wood, studying insects, or analyzing soil—Wang reimagines this relationship by proposing modes of symbiosis with trees, collaboration with ants, and the construction of subterranean networks that weave together all living entities.

Mushrooms serve as her medium for entering a deeper dialogue with the natural world. Through the infiltration of mycelium into host organisms, she decrypts, transforms, and translates their hidden narratives, reassembling these revelations into new forms that emerge as sculptural manifestations of fungi.