“Identity, for me, isn't something that has to be pinned down as a fixed label. It's more like a few coins of different currencies sitting in my pocket — different denominations, different weights, each carrying traces of somewhere it's been.”—Freja Jiahui Ye

CNTRFLD. You've just completed two exhibitions this month, with a virtual exhibition currently running in New York and more projects on the horizon. It feels like an incredibly active moment in your practice. What has this period been teaching you, and how do these different exhibitions speak to one another?

FJY. This year has felt both challenging and like the beginning of a new stage for me. I moved through some very different exhibition contexts: long-term shows, a one-day pop-up, an online virtual exhibition, a public outdoor project, a walking exhibition, a residency exhibition in Germany, spaces closer to underground rave culture. Each of these made me rethink the conditions under which a work can actually begin to speak.

I've come to realise a work isn't a fixed object once it's finished. Once it enters different spaces, it forms new relationships, reveals different possibilities. I often make site-responsive adjustments, sometimes it isn't me deciding how the work should exist, it's the space itself telling me how it needs to be understood anew.

In a traditional white cube, the environment tends to be extremely quiet and controlled, and within it the work seems to become more cautious, almost as if it's waiting for the viewer to approach. The walking exhibition was different, a sculpture that was meant to be looked at began to move through the rhythms of the city instead. I carried a heavy sculpture linked by chains through parks and streets, at times having to shoulder it forward. Unlike a traditional exhibition, where viewers choose to enter a relationship of looking, these encounters were mostly accidental — passersby hadn't chosen in advance to look at a work of art, it simply appeared in the middle of their everyday path. Some stopped to film us. Others just walked by. I still think about that sometimes, whether it counts as being seen if no one meant to look.

In the underground rave space, the work ('02:47-unknown’) became something else again. It lay in a corner at the edge of the crowd, inside a dim tent, and the audience didn't approach it deliberately — they stumbled into it while moving through the space. Some paused to register it was there. Others simply passed by, not even noticing it. In the online exhibition, the work (damp town) lost its physical weight altogether and became image and pixel. I've increasingly felt an exhibition isn't a container for a finished work; it's more like an act of translation. The work, the space and the audience translate one another, change one another in the process. I'm not really carrying a work from place to place. I'm listening to how it speaks differently each time, under different conditions. Finishing a piece is maybe only half of its life.

The other half happens after, once it's out in the world, I'm still working out what that means, exactly.

CNTRFLD. Your work often begins with materials or conditions that many people might overlook — damp walls, rust, crystallisation, sound or gradual decay. What first drew you to these quiet, unstable forces, and what do they allow you to express that more conventional materials cannot?

FJY. Where my interest in these materials comes from... honestly, whenever I think about it, I end up thinking about my mother. She was a chemistry teacher, and I basically grew up around her lab— beakers, heating things up, crystallisation, precipitation, looking through a microscope at things invisible to the naked eye, watching matter shift from one state into another. That was never an abstract concept for me. It was just what I saw after school every day. Pretty ordinary, really.

The materials that draw me in all seem to share one thing: they never behave. Even when nobody's watching, they keep moving on their own — seeping, rusting, decaying. That disobedience, weirdly, feels closer to how I understand the world than stable materials do. It's not really "making", it's more like negotiating — observing and moving forward together with the material. That's also why I don't want the material to carry some fixed message. Its power comes from bypassing preset interpretations and speaking directly to the senses.

Conventional materials mostly do what you tell them, on your schedule. Take Damptown. Dampness doesn't seduce you, exactly. What it's good at is blurring edges, making your skin start to question where "outside" ends and "inside" begins. Past a certain humidity, the air itself gets weight, and you can't ignore the surface of your own body anymore. You remember your skin is there, pressed against your clothes, against the air, against the humidity itself, and none of those boundaries feel quite clear anymore. It slows your breathing down, slows how you move, makes it hard to hold a single thought. The whole room settles into something close to inertia, everything damp, everything waiting.

There's a wishing element built into the space too. What people are doing when they make a wish isn't really seeking a response. It's closer to an admission, that you can't fully control your own wanting. You hand something private over to the water, then go on with your life, and at some point, you stop quite remembering where it went. It becomes something in there, changing on its own terms. Maybe it's already grown into something else entirely.

Then Amor Fati, large pieces of woven fabric soaked in a pool of chemical solvent, left to grow its own crystals until they hardened into something like mineral ore. Once formed, I sewed the pieces together until they became something wearable. That took months. You'd check on it daily and barely see it move, slow to the point of feeling almost hopeless. Sometimes it grew wrong, and I'd start over. The process asks for a patience that borders on having no hope of it ever finishing. Then, at the end, it dissolves all at once, in water. Smell first, then sound, then temperature, the feeling of time itself passing.

CNTRFLD. Looking back, were there any moments from your childhood or upbringing that shaped the way you see the world today? Whether through places, memories, stories or everyday experiences, can you trace the beginnings of the artistic language you've developed?

FJY. A lot of this started earlier than I realised.

My parents came from very different backgrounds, and different religions too. In their generation in China, marriage wasn't really built on romantic love; it had more to do with the era, with family pressure. So as a kid, I often lived between two worlds that couldn't fully line up with each other.

When they clashed, I naturally became the one trying to understand both sides. I kept asking myself why one person would think that way, and why the other could not accept it at all. I got used to standing in the middle very early on. That experience was pretty exhausting, and there was a kind of tearing feeling to it. It's a strange position to be in, always trying to understand both sides at once. Later I realised I just kept being drawn to things that resist easy categories.

There's another thread that comes from a very specific bodily memory, and it's also where Damp Town started. I'm from a small island in the south of China surrounded by sea, and every year there's this season called “huínántiān” — the damp return season. The moisture in the air condenses on the walls, the floor, the windows; water runs down the walls, the wooden doors swell up from soaking in all that moisture, and the whole space starts to feel like it has a body of its own. As a kid I just found it annoying. It was only much later that I realised those things I'd taken for granted all my life were shaping the way I see the world.

Then there's the sound of cicadas.  Back home, they always reach your ears before summer arrives. Once your body hears it, you know the season has changed. After I moved to England, that switch never went off again. Is that a kind of loss? I still don't know how to answer that. What I do know is that summer here has never felt fully convincing to me. That dampness, that sound, that temperature — they're not things I “remember”; they've just stayed in my body the whole time.

CNTRFLD. Your practice moves fluidly between sculpture, installation, performance, sound and scenography, with works like Amor Fati, Damp Town and With Each Leap, The Rabbit Breaks a Bell's Tail inviting audiences into immersive, sensory environments. How do you decide which medium a particular idea needs, and what have these projects revealed to you about transformation, vulnerability and the body?

FJY. I don't decide in advance which medium an idea has to match.

Basically, I just let myself experiment freely, whether it works out or not, it counts. A lot of the time something falls apart, and that failure ends up pulling the work in a completely new direction, which is its own kind of surprise.

Like with Damp Town, at the very start, I genuinely never imagined that seven characters would slowly grow out of it. Halfway through, purely by chance, I got into sound production, and it suddenly hit me, why not give this little town its own dedicated immersive soundscape? So, I started carrying recording equipment around, specifically seeking out rainy days to wander into the outskirts, abandoned sites, parks, back paths. I recorded all kinds of sounds, human and non-human, and eventually combined them with my own studio playing and editing together as background.

I really don't over-plan things. An idea arrives, the materials are in hand, and I just keep following it; slowly it becomes what it becomes. I'm not forcibly moulding it into some predetermined shape. I know that might sound a bit mystical, but creation isn't a process fully controlled by me. The materials, the space, the things that happen by accident, they all push back and shape how the work develops. My role isn't to decide what it should become, but to keep listening and responding as I go. It's almost like the work has something to say — like it's the one that finds me.

In residence in Hamburg later also affected me deeply. I'd wanted to work with the stage for a long time, and it was in Germany that I first seriously studied it and got to see so many large-scale, avant-garde live works like Florentina Holzinger and Tianzhuo Chen, etc. That artistic language hit hard, it took me a long time to recover after watching. I noticed that the live works most touch me all refuse that clean, “pure” kind of artistic language, and instead embrace mixture, excess, even a slightly grotesque texture. They're not “performing a story” for an audience to watch, they directly build a temporary world that you walk straight into and stay inside of.

I don't want to make the kind of thing where “here's a sculpture,” and the audience just stands on the outside looking in. What I want to make is more like “here's an event happening,” a living environment with a sense of ritual. Like an artificially constructed ecosystem, an ongoing ceremony, even a kind of small-scale imagined civilisation. Completing that shift from the audience “standing and watching” to the audience “walking in and participating.”

As for what these projects have revealed to me about transformation, vulnerability and the body: transformation never happens according to plan. It's hidden inside the experiments that spiral out of control, fail, or veer off course halfway through.

Vulnerability isn't just a concept I apply to the work. I was diagnosed with hyperthyroidism as a teenager, and it's something I'll likely be on medication for the rest of my life. Before the diagnosis I just thought I was anxious. Then a doctor gave it a name, and I realised something inside my own body, invisible, but not accountable to me, had been setting the pace of both my physiology and my emotions the whole time. Some nights my heart would race so fast I could feel it even lying down. I'd look at my own hand and not be able to make it stop shaking. Who was in charge in that moment, was it me, or was I just watching? I still don't have a clean answer. That's probably where my understanding of vulnerability comes from, before it ever became a subject in my work. It's part of why Amor Fati has edges sharp enough to cut — I wanted the performer to feel, in real time, what it's like when a body can't fully protect or control itself. That lack of solidity is exactly what lets an audience come in and connect with the work. The body isn't a tool for expression either. It's simply a member of that world, living and changing together with all the sounds, objects and space around it.

CNTRFLD. Having lived, studied and exhibited across China, the UK, Germany, the United States and elsewhere, how have these different cultural environments influenced your thinking? Has moving between places changed your understanding of identity, belonging or what it means to make work today?

FJY. It's hard for me to say that any one place gave me some specific influence. It feels more like years of moving around, studying, and exhibiting, and each move meant re-adjusting my relationship with the environment all over again.

When I first got to the UK, the missing cicadas were the first thing I noticed — I've talked about that elsewhere, the way a body keeps expecting a sound that never comes. But it went further than that. It took a while before I understood that the feeling of a place doesn't come from its name or its geography, but from the sensory relationship you've built up with it over years. When that relationship is interrupted, you suddenly realise you've been carrying things you never actually chose to carry.

During my residency in Germany, there were these odd, small moments. I think awkwardness is the most honest vantage point for observation. A lot of the interesting seminars were taught in German, which meant that the courses available to me in English were quite limited.

That's when you realise how language quietly builds an invisible wall. You're not shut out because you lack the ability, but because a certain door was simply closed to begin with. Some thresholds just exist. Or take this: you could smoke inside the building, even during class. It felt strangely contradictory — so rigorous on the surface, but with this strange looseness underneath.

You start noticing the cracks between the official rules and how things run. Or walking down the street, feeling people's eyes on you, directly, unapologetically, that's what made me start noticing how the body gets "read" by a society. Or my boots were too loud indoors, so I switched to a quieter pair. Not out of obedience, but because I'd started noticing how sound changes the way you exist in a space.

I used to think belonging was a kind of security, without it, I'd feel uneasy. But I've slowly come to feel that belonging is more like a capacity: being able to move between different experiences without rushing to settle down completely. Identity, for me, isn't something that has to be pinned down as a fixed label. It's more like a few coins of different currencies sitting in my pocket — different denominations, different weights, each carrying traces of somewhere it's been. They never become the same currency. They just happen to be in the same pocket together and sometimes, when I walk, I can hear them knock against each other.