Light/Shadow 光阴 | Cyanotype Exhibition on the Upper West Side, NYC
/Light/Shadow 光阴
Cyanotypes by Yao Xiao
On View at Chalait
461 Amsterdam Ave, New York, NY 10024
For three years during the COVID-19 pandemic, I lived in New York and longed to return to my hometown in China. When I was finally able to visit China in 2023, I wanted to capture the place in a way more vivid than drawing and photographs. I began making these cyanotypes in my parents house. I found a new closeness with the subjects in the cyanotype form; instead of making an illusion of the object, I was directly using physical material that only existed at that time and place.
I started with plants, an edible tree named changchun, and mugwort, used for duanwu festival, leaves for wrapping zongzi. I moved on to objects that are meaningful to me: my mother’s jewelry, new year’s decorations. These are from a collection of 22 cyanotypes created in the summer of 2023 in Tianjin, China.
The cyanotypes are a record of ephemeral gatherings and memories that would not be repeated again. Through this process, I explored the limitations of art as a way to capture time. They ask the question: is memory eternal? Or is it temporary, like the fifteen minutes it took when the object sat on top of the paper?
Read more about the process of making cyanotypes below. Purchase select prints on Etsy.
Yao Xiao
Yao Xiao is a local artist living on the Upper West Side.
Yao Xiao is born and raised in Tianjin, China and based in New York City. She is a MacDowell Fellow, and the author of graphic novel Everything Is Beautiful, And I’m Not Afraid. Her illustrations and writing have been published in The New Yorker, Los Angeles Times, TIME, Catapult, Lit Hub, and Autostraddle. Yao Xiao makes art about straddling and bridging different worlds and navigating difficult memories. Her work blends emotion, experience, and imagination together with visual imagery, starting conversations about the complex interiority of first generation immigrants.
