Amy Yao

Amy Yao (b. June 18, 1977, Los Angeles, California) is a contemporary visual artist making work in many different mediums informed by ideas of waste and consumption. She is represented by Various Small Fires in Los Angeles and 47 Canal in New York City. Yao is a lecturer in visual arts at Princeton University, NJ. [1] Her sister Wendy is proprietor of Ooga Booga art boutique in Los Angeles.[2]

Yao received a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Art Center College of Design in CA in 1999 and a Master of Fine Arts from Yale University in CT in 2007.[1]

She has exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art (Eckhaus Latta: Possessed),[3] MoMA PS1 (Greater New York, 2010),[4] 47 Canal (Weeds of Indifference),[5] and Various Small Fires (Bay of Smokes).[6]

Writing about Weeds of Indifference in Artforum, Chloe Wyma noted, "Refusing the readymade’s historical and contemporary postures—the cynical/ironic critique of the commodity form, the mystification of materials—Yao’s gnomic, desublimated sculptures are sometimes puzzling and not always easy to love. Nonetheless, their difficulties reflect honest questions: 'What is even real?' she asks, speaking of when 'the new authentic is used to eradicate what came before.'"[5]

In 1993, Yao, with her sister Wendy, was a founding member of Emily's Sassy Lime an all-Asian American teenage riot grrrl trio from Southern California. The band dissolved in 1997.