Yuehan Dai

Artist Statement

My artistic practice is grounded in process as a form of resistance: Resistance to closure, to fixed meaning, and to imposed structures. Working across various disciplines — linguistic and architectural — I see process art as a direct challenge to systems obsessed with order, efficiency, and finality. This is not merely an aesthetic choice but a weapon against the tyranny of clarity. 

Through my work, I question the notion of the boundary as something distant from the center a membrane that separates and protects from otherness. I see the boundary as an indeterminate place inhabited by marginalized groups; it demarcates the exceptional cases within general rules and marks the intersection of different disciplines. Boundaries function as permeable borders — whether linguistic, architectural, cellular, or legal policies that restrict the body — serving as (in)visible thresholds that define our sense of self and transform the ways we interact with others. My work plays with linguistic methods to explore the fluidity of these boundaries, employing installations, text, and interdisciplinary collaborations to immerse the audience in the dual nature of membranes — as both a protective barrier and permeable layer. 

Yuehan Dai
Dream of Fetus (2025)
Installation
Thermochromic ink, paper, fabric

What touches back when we touch a boundary? Even when the boundary is untouchable, it is felt cognitively and physically. Separations rendered by the boundary can also be generative sites of connection. Dream of Fetus explores the layered meanings of the boundary. The gallery space functions as a thermal membrane. Through a performance-based process, I engage my body as a tool for creating non-permanent traces and ephemeral marks on the surface to reveal colors, texts, and images that appear momentarily. As visitors interact within the space their body heat further activates the surface, leaving behind temporary traces of contact and fleeting connections imprinted on the boundary. The trace of heat serves as a record of this moment of recognition, illustrating the boundary as a transitory site that can function as both a point of connection and a site of separation. 

Only partial information is visible through these encounters; a constraint that mirrors the condition of the fetus inside the womb. Inspired by The Dream of the Foetus, a fictional pseudo-scientific essay, I expand on its central thesis: that humans experience states of transition and pass ancestral memories, which are embodied by the fetus via their dreams. Using literary imagination, text, images, and various hypotheses, I ask: When did humans become human? During fetal development? In infancy? Or, from their moment of self-awareness? Reflecting on the boundary through which the world and information are experienced — in fragments and through touch — the work reflects on the relational process of self-realization.