A Scene That Stays | Inside Out: A Conversation with Yijun Yang

Yijun Yang’s work moves between domesticity and visual fiction, creating constructed scenes that examine the fragility of memory and cultural identity. As an interdisciplinary artist and scenic designer based in New York City, Yang masterfully utilizes everyday objects manipulated at unexpected scales to present images of raw, tangible stillness that hold deep feeling beyond mere narrative or explanation. In this text-based conversation, she invites us to her profound collaborative philosophy on how empty spaces continue to carry emotional resonance long after a character has exited the frame.

ELSEHERE: Before you had a name for what you were doing, was there an earlier way you understood yourself in relation to space, image, or atmosphere?

Yijun Yang: I have always felt slightly removed from the environment around me, being present but at a distance. In loud, crowded spaces I would go quiet inside, almost zoning out, watching everything from somewhere just behind my own eyes. As a child I talked to myself when I was alone. Not to anyone, no coherent scene.  I don't think anyone understood what I was saying, even myself. Later I became a people-watcher. I would study someone's coat, a piece of jewelry, the way they held a bag, and begin to construct a story around them. I think that habit is still at the center of everything I do. There is always a scene forming in my mind may not yet an image, just a condition. A room that is about to happen.

ELSEHERE: You write that your work moves between domesticity and visual fiction, and that it holds feeling beyond narrative or explanation. When do you know a scene has reached that threshold, where it no longer needs to explain itself but can still carry emotional force?

Yijun Yang: Much of my work carries message, but the message is not the story, it is part of the surface. What I am really building is a canvas for the things that dialogue and performance cannot deliver on their own. I work closely with collaborators, especially directors of photography, and lighting designers. Because the work becomes most fully itself through those shared talented minds. The choices that matter most are the color of a background, which key prop anchors the frame, how light and shadow will move through the lens when a character reaches for an object. I consider a scene complete when what remains after a character exits is still doing work. When the empty space carries the emotion forward. That residue is what I am always looking for.

ELSEHERE: Your recent materials include work in film, set design, and staged visual environments. When you move between cinematic space and theatrical space, what remains constant for you beneath the shift in medium?

Yijun Yang: The texture and mood of the space that is always the constant. Whatever the medium, I am trying to build world where the unspoken can be felt. Language has limits. Acting has limits. What I can do is create an environment that holds what the words and the body cannot quite reach. That does not change whether I am working for a camera or for a live audience.

Stills for These Women, 2025, Indie Experimental Film, Installation pieces, In post-production, NYC

ELSEHERE: Your work feels intimate, but not confessional. How do you decide how much of the personal to keep embedded, and how much to leave unsaid?

Yijun Yang: Every viewer arrives with their own point of view, their own history of looking. I try to build around a single theme, a single line of feeling, a single emotion, and offer it as an invitation rather than a statement. It is not about agreement or argument. It is more like starting a quiet conversation, one where the other person is free to take it wherever it needs to go for them. I am offering my point of view, but I am not asking anyone to adopt it.

ELSEHERE: When you are building a space, whether for film, theater, or installation, do you think of yourself more as composing an image, staging a memory, or constructing a psychological condition?

Yijun Yang: It depends on what the work is asking for. When I am collaborating with a director, we talk first about what we want the audience to carry with them when they leave then I build from there. I take the challenge the director gives me and try to create the world the script, and the characters cannot achieve alone. In my own installation work, the approach is different. The scale is usually smaller, and the intention is quieter. Less is more. A simple feeling, offered carefully, can reach further than something elaborately constructed. I am trying to create an echo not a statement.

ELSEHERE: At this stage of your life and work, what feels most urgent for you to keep pursuing, even if it remains difficult to define clearly?

Yijun Yang: Each piece I make holds a trace of where I was and how I was seeing, what I was learning, what I did not yet understand when I made it. That accumulation is what I find most important to keep following. The work helps me understand myself. And that process, over time, is what I think shapes practice into something that is genuinely yours. I do not need to be able to name what I am pursuing. I just need to keep going toward it. 

ELSEHERE: When people encounter your work, what do you hope stays with them after the scene is gone, the exhibition closes, or the image disappears?

Yijun Yang: A quietness. Something more like the feeling of having been briefly still in a way you did not expect. I want that to stay in the body a little longer than the image itself.

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Yijun Yang's Works

Production Photo for Reunion West End Musical Star Concert, 2025, Shanghai

Director: Earl Carpenter, Ramin, Karimloo

Set Design: Yijun Yang, Lighting Design: Bowen Li, Sound Design: Oliver Durrant

Production Photo for Little Shop of Horror, 2025, Calhoun School, NYC

Director: Will Lacker

Set Design: Yijun Yang, Lighting Design: Matt Lazurus, Sound Designer: Alison Herold, Costume Design: Jenn Hoddinott

Stills for Show Trial, 2025, Indie Political Thriller, In post-production, NYC

Director: Leon Liu

DOP: Larry Liang

Production Designer: Yijun Yang, Costume Designer: Kenny Bian, Sound Mixer: Jonniece Howard, Yiran Chen, Robert Mcmanhon, Hunter Hawke, HMU: Rayna Zhong

Cast: Scott Winters, Alexander Elisa, Max Avery-Lichtenstein

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About Yijun Yang

Yijun Yang is an interdisciplinary artist working across film, installation, and theater, based in New York City. Her work explores the fragility of memory and cultural identity throughout storytelling. She holds an MFA in Scenic Design from Carnegie Mellon University's School of Drama and is the recipient of the George Kimberly Award for Set Design. Her work has been presented at A.R.T. New York, the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, and the SIFF Film Festival, among other venues.

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Artist Statement

Yijun Yang is an interdisciplinary artist working across installation, theater, and film. Her practice investigates how emotion and memory leave traces in space. Through constructed scenes built from everyday objects manipulated at unexpected scales, she examines the fragility of memory and cultural identity. The work moves between domesticity and visual fiction, presenting images of raw, tangible stillness that hold feeling beyond narrative or explanation.

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About Inside Out

Inside Out is ELSEHERE’s long-form conversation series, published through STRATUM. It begins from the belief that before artists are understood through category, institution, or medium, they must also be encountered through the deeper structures that shape a practice over time: memory, method, contradiction, relation, and the conditions of life pressing from within the work. This conversation with Yijun Yang has been edited from her written responses for publication.

Edited by Yuyang Hu