Yi Cynthia Chen on “Reaching Through Fog: Opaque Paintings”
On view at The Crossings Gallery
When I first interviewed Yi Cynthia Chen last spring for her show Willful Dialects, I left our conversation with the sense that she is someone who moves through the world with unusual attunement. Yi has a way of noticing things and tracing connections. When she reached out again about her new solo exhibition, Reaching Through Fog: Opaque Paintings, it felt less like picking up a new thread and more like returning to a conversation already in motion.
This time, we’re meeting Yi not as a curator assembling the voices of many, but as an artist revealing her own. Reaching Through Fog threads together personal and ancestral histories, meditations on mental health, and the soft, complicated terrains of grief and vitality. Across scrolls, photographs, and what she calls “mind landscapes,” Yi considers the continued presence of her grandmothers, the long shadow of cultural silence around mental illness, and the psychic architecture we inherit and try to unlearn.
Our interview wandered through these themes: intergenerational memory, embodiment, opacity, the agency of nature, and the subtle ways art becomes a tool for navigating one’s internal weather. Yi’s work venerates curiosity and, with a care so singular, invites us to meticulously and eagerly unravel the constructs that keep us small.
Below is our second conversation together, meandering through the heartwork of Reaching Through Fog.
FATIMA
Yi, welcome back to Mister. First off, congratulations on the success of Willful Dialects and now the emergence of Reaching Through Fog, your second solo show. It feels so good to be in conversation with you again. To start us off, how long has this body of work been taking shape for you?”
YI
I would say I've been working on this body of work consistently for about two years. The first photographs were originally taken in 2020 during Stop Asian Hate and reprinted on mulberry paper in 2024. I always have this ethos that as an artist, it's kind of fun to create with a hypothetical show in mind, and then the home for it can follow later.
FATIMA
This new exhibition is titled Reaching Through Fog. You mentioned that it reflects both your paternal grandmother's suicide and your maternal grandmother's thriving presence. How did you navigate the emotional spectrum between loss and vitality within your practice?
YI
Art is one way of processing reality, emotions, and cognitions, hopefully clarifying moments when they are in conflict. The journey of making reveals what is under the surface. You’re able to think about your personal past, as well as social and cultural pasts. At the same time you can ground it in the present moment. What’s alive now? How do we address ideas which will be important going forward?
FATIMA
Yes, I love the ability of art to address time and how, while you’re making, all those different temporal points can sort of filter through you. While you were painting, did you feel the presence of the matriarchal figures in your life?
YI
Sometimes I imagine my paternal grandmother reincarnated her life energy into me. She didn’t get to live her whole life and I have the privilege of being able to live. I try to live in this space of connection.
FATIMA
That’s incredibly moving. To touch on that a little further, when we were communicating score this interview, you mentioned your grandmother’s suicide not being a unique experience. How does this exhibition fit into a larger dialogue about mental health, family narratives, and Asian American experiences?
YI
We all live in our brains and experience life through our mental filters and nervous systems. My newest painting Nervous System touches on this shared experience. Mental illness touches many people… It came out that one of my friends’ paternal grandmothers also committed suicide, which is so randomly similar that it made us both laugh.
Whether it is due to cultural stigmas, social norms, or lack of knowledge, for our parents’ and their parents’ generation, being vulnerable about mental health was not necessarily an option.
This affects our generation’s experience of developing mental tools. I realized I needed those tools as a child, especially in my relatively isolating experience of growing up Asian American with internalized racism and in the specific family dynamic I was in with parents who had their own mental battles.
In a way, we're all moving through mental fog to find clarity, whatever the fog looks like for you. I’m still learning how to figure out who I am as a person outside of social conditioning.
FATIMA
I resonate with that. It’s a continuous journey of learning and unlearning, trying to dig through all those different hazy layers.
Internalized racism is a huge thing to tackle. How has art allowed you to move through that, whether through making or being in art spaces?
YI
It’s twofold. The arts environment motivates me in part because of all the ways people express themselves and find their voices within the greater fabric.
The art itself also helps me see my background as positive. It helps to dig deeper into American and Chinese art history. It’s an adventure to see where these histories overlap or speak differently.
My favorite Chinese figurative paintings are ink paintings with “xie yi” that try to capture the essence or gesture of a subject, without an attachment to realism that was more common in European oil paintings. We can also see overlap in ethos with expressionist figures and, say, cynical realism in China, searching to express emotional realities through figures.
Understanding how cultures value distinct forms pulls me out of hierarchies of aesthetics to see how there are always other centers. In understanding these art histories, I understand that myself and others are correlated.
FATIMA
We can see those histories throughout your work. Your piece Chinoiserie in Action explores the impacts of Chinoiserie, the European co-optation and imitation of Chinese and other Sinosphere artistic traditions. In your previous solo presentation, Third and a Half Space, you reactivated the piece by painting over the figure representing the staggering statistics of suicide ideation and attempts among Asian American youth. You painted over that figure in white. What role does activation play in your visual storytelling?
YI
I see what I make as living objects. What I paint reverberates outward into the lives of people who view it.
Meditating on the figure jumping off a bridge, I wanted a different ending for her. So in painting over her, I saw her life going in a different direction. Yes, you’re still in this stormy, rainy landscape, but the path where you’re jumping off the bridge doesn’t have to be the way your story ends or is conveyed.
The landscape of Chinoiserie as Action envisioned what it would feel like to live inside one of those Chinoiserie ceramics, and the desire to break out of objectification and wrongful interpretation.
This triptych is a painting paired with photographs of myself in a Chinoiserie dress on top of a ceramic. This lets the ceramic object come out as a living, breathing person.
FATIMA
We touched on this in our last interview, the ability of the Western gaze to extract without listening or seeing the full picture. We’ve talked about wanting viewers to look for deeper meanings without the artist having to overtly explain their identity or point of view. How are you balancing subtlety and clarity within this exhibition?
YI
Even though my paintings in this exhibition are large-format, they each have a lot of small details. Due to the fact that they’re relatively big, the first instinct is to believe you understand them right away. But the way I layered the paintings invites the viewer to unfold those details and see how there’s more to the story, which I think is a similar experience to getting to know someone.
For example, one of the paintings has tiny penises hanging over Gauguin, who was an artist who perpetrated a lot of sexual violence against Southeast Asian women and young girls. Small details as such allude to larger conversations for the viewer to dive deeper into.
One of the reasons I named the exhibition Opaque Paintings was to explore the idea of opacity. I would posit you can never really know yourself in full actuality, let alone get to know someone else entirely front to back, outside and in. The idea of opacity refers to Glissant’s Right to Opacity where the subject realizes that they don’t have to be transparent to a singular truth. At the same time, being open to express who you are, even in your imperfect self, can be psychologically liberating.
FATIMA
On those details, I’d love to speak more about the mediums you chose for this exhibition. The scrolls lead us to your Chinese heritage, while oil painting is where your skill and experience really shine. What was it like crossing narratives between these mediums? How do these different mediums help you express complex ideas around mental wellness and intergenerational experiences?
YI
For the scrolls, and also one of the sculptures, they incorporate photography, which captures ‘reality’ at an arguably quicker speed than in painting. In this book I’m reading, Smooth by Byung-Chul Han, he talks about how photographs are sometimes seen as very “transparent” mediums. We see a photograph and think we see reality.
Whereas painting, for me, is built entirely from the mind and then later physically transferred on the canvas… I am drawn to paint scenes which would be difficult or near impossible to photograph. I enjoy an interplay between something seen as grounded in physical reality, like a photograph, and something constructed from a mental or metaphysical reality. My paintings are “mind landscapes,” visualizing something cerebral that doesn’t necessarily have a physical translation.
FATIMA
I love the term “mind landscapes” because as I go through your paintings, I’m always thinking about how much agency you give nature. The way the earth comes in contact with objects in your paintings feels almost overwhelming, where land is pushing against or reclaiming. I’d love to hear more about the ecologies that persist throughout your work and your personal relationship with the environment.
YI
Thanks for noticing the agency of nature. I constantly appreciate how the natural world persists despite man’s constructions. In Nervous System, there’s a flowering ginseng plant, with its roots coming out of the human subject’s ear.
I hope my work continues to dissect mental, social, and political constructs and often plants are the beings that are able to push through those constructs.
FATIMA
The way land reflects the body, nature pushing through like one’s own ability to push through restraints. What a soul-stirring image.
Going back to Willful Dialects, what has been different about creating this exhibition? What are some of the threads or concerns that have persisted from Willful Dialects into Reaching Through Fog?
YI
Willful Dialects was so inspiring. Each artist had such unique mediums and visual languages. Each of the twenty artists were able to enter so many conversations within each individual work.
It is sometimes easier to celebrate other people’s work. Curation involves a lot of seeing the good and potential in a wide breadth of artists to find areas where their unique ideas overlap and have symbiotic dialogues.
When it comes to my own practice, I’ve trained myself to sometimes focus on only areas I can improve. This ties back to the idea of the mental filter, letting go of negative beliefs or harmful thought patterns when it comes to your own work. You’re just as worthy of celebrating your own work in the same manner you are able to celebrate others.
FATIMA
What has breaking through those barriers looked like for you? Has creating this exhibition been a mode for that?
YI
Creating an exhibit exposes the ways artworks and people join together. This act reaffirmed areas where the work itself exists in a larger conversation, separate from any ideas I have about myself as the maker or vessel.
The artworks themselves reference interconnection. The act of exhibition design with Gabriella E. Melchiorri and Chen Luo, working with the fantastic staff at the Harvard Ed Portal and inviting a guest moderator, Danni Shen, a curator and writer at the Carpenter Center for Visual Arts at Harvard University, was a dynamic team effort.
The opening reception itself is a chance to appreciate people in my life who show up for me and who I hope to show up for as well.
At the opening, I was able to see how folks connected to the topics in the talk. After doing more research, I found out that according to a 2022 National Survey on Drug Use and Health, 1 in 5 Americans live with mental illness. I was constantly reminded throughout this process how none of us are ever truly alone in this human experience.
I aim to be like the tree in the painting Chinoiserie as Action, where tree roots are connected through mycorrhizal fungi in the “wood wide web.” The exhibition reverberates the idea that none of us exists as single entities, but rather as part of an interconnected and symbiotic forest.
FATIMA
Have there been any touchstones you’ve been drawing from throughout this exhibition?
YI
I’m intrigued by the practice of experimenting. I welded interconnected root systems with reclaimed metal to make a stand for the painting Footprint. A part of resilient mental health is seeing the world as your oyster, being curious to walk down previously unconsidered paths.
FATIMA
I love that painting, and I love how the stand melts into it. What has wellness looked like for you over the last couple of years? Wellness is a term that’s hard to define because it varies for everyone. What does it mean to you?
YI
“Melting” is an awesome descriptor. Wellness does look different for everyone. For myself it has manifested as self-acceptance and not wanting to run away from who I am. This requires a lot of positive self affirmation.
FATIMA
Which part of this exhibition do you think people might overlook at first glance but that you hope they discover?
YI
On the back of the sculpture with the roots Footprint, there’s a photograph. In the image, you can see a tree growing just as tall as an electrical pole. It’s amazing to witness how nature survives despite its circumstances. Plants just want to have life and grow, and that’s beautiful. This exhibition celebrates an idea of simply wanting to be in this world. I hope this shines through.
FATIMA
That’s so beautiful. I feel like as humans in the Western world, we disconnect ourselves from nature. We don’t see ourselves as having that same resilience. This exhibition is going to be really important for helping people recognize that they have the same tenacity as that tree growing tall beside the pole. Regardless of the infrastructures that harm our mental health, we’re able to grow just as tall or overcome them.
Now to shake things off, if Reaching Through Fog were a song or a sound, what would it be and why?
YI
Oh my God, hit the hammer on the nail. I actually just remixed songs I want to turn into a video. The first song is by Fort Minor called Remember the Name. He has this line: “[art or rapping] is 20% skill, 80% fear.” I love this lyric because making and exhibiting art requires overcoming a lot of fear. Fear manifests as procrastination, self sabotage, or embarrassment, and the only way to push through is to trust the skill and knowledge underneath those emotions.
This song is remixed with Yung Bleu’s Dark Clouds. He sings the lyric: “I’ve been seeing dark clouds lately, but it’s the dark clouds that made me.” I agree with his statement about how the hard things you go through now make you who you are. Even if they feel so big, those clouds make you the inherently awesome person you are.
FATIMA
That’s incredible, I'm so glad I asked this! I resonate with the hustle of moving through fear to create, and I feel like this exhibition really honors that.
Yi, thank you, always. It was such a joy talking with you.
Reaching Through Fog: Opaque Paintings is on display at Crossing’s Gallery
