Primal Echoes 回归本源 / CINDY YAO / Solo Show
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Opening Times 10am - 6pm
Cindy Yao (born in China, based in London) is a multidisciplinary artist working across performance, installation, painting, and sound. Her early practice interrogated how the female body is shaped and consumed within systems of patriarchy and capitalism, critically engaging with the politics of the gaze and symbolic structures. In recent years, her focus has turned inward - toward the spiritual body as a vessel of energy. Red emerges as a recurring motif, through which she explores the intersections of love, healing, and death. Through meditation, ritual performance, and collective resonance, Yao transforms personal experience into shared energetic fields, allowing art to become a luminous channel for reimagining intimacy and reconnecting with the soul.
Cindy Yao’s practice has long centred on the body as a site where energy and meaning converge. Primal Echoes, her landmark solo exhibition, expands and deepens her ongoing exploration of body, desire, and spirituality. Her early works juxtaposed luxury brand symbols with corporeal imagery, revealing how consumerism and patriarchy collude to construct the “woman of desire” through commodification and the gaze. Yet these explorations were never solely acts of critique; they laid the conceptual groundwork for a more urgent question: how might the body liberate itself from discipline and alienation to reclaim spiritual freedom and energetic agency?
Primal Echoes crystallises this inquiry, positioning the body as an energetic field that bridges individual experience, collective emotion, and cosmic vibration. Yao’s works are not merely visual statements but living invitations—beckoning audiences into spaces of love, wounding, and rebirth, and into encounters with the healing, transformative power of art as it flows through light and love.
Exhibition Projects:
Aphrodite Aphrodite is a ritual performance of love and healing. Seated at the centre of a heart-shaped sculpture woven from vines, I serve as a conduit for divine energy, channeling vibrational frequencies through the resonance of a crystal bowl. The structure embodies both the root of love and the cyclical rhythm of life and death. Through this immersive act, I invite audiences into an energetic field of shared resonance and spiritual release. Inspired by ThetaHealing’s practice of “downloading light,” the work activates a flow of divine frequency - restoring the heart, grounding the body, and illuminating collective emotion with the radiant force of love.
Medium: performance art Theme: life and death, spiritual release, healing, love Duration: 30 minutes Premiere: 2025, London
Consumption Cindy’s practice interrogates how consumerism reshapes the relationship between object and subject, asking what it means to be human in an age of simulacra and spectacle. In Learning is a Painful Process, I taught a pig to recognise luxury brands, later transforming its leg into ham branded with fashion logos. The work critiques how consumption turns life into a symbol, colluding with patriarchy to oppress women through invisible forms of violence, what Foucault called “capillary ecologies of power” that saturate the air we breathe.
Medium: sculpture Theme: Consumerism, power, Animal Symbolism, Disembodiment Year: 2021
Intuition Rooted in desire and intimacy, this work explores the tension between tenderness and control within relationships. A lip imprint within a heart-shaped form becomes an intimate trace, marking the threshold between soul and flesh. Red threads flow like bloodlines, weaving passion and pain against the shimmering presence of gold leaf. This interplay of sacredness and sensuality reveals desire’s dual nature: transcendent yet primal, life-giving yet destructive. Through painting, collage, and material experimentation, the piece transforms longing into a tactile memory of the body, inviting viewers to feel the breath and burn of intimacy.
Medium: Performance installation Theme: Red silk, branches, Tibetan singing bowls, sound, body, meditation Duration: 3 hours Premiere: 2025, London
烧DIOR As Mary Douglas wrote, “the body is a reproduction of the social structure and social order.” In capitalist society, the female body is no longer natural but a site where inverted social relations unfold. It embodies the discipline of visibility, symbolic representation, and the operations of capitalisation. In this work, I use the image of a police station prison to signify discipline, contrasted with the sexualised figure of the capitalised male. The woman, seen through the female gaze outside the prison, resists patriarchal control and exposes the entanglement of power, gender, and consumption.
Medium: video Theme: Body, Consumerism, Capital, Patriarchy, Gaze Year: 2023