Yvette Yujie Yang/ Volume 100

Yvette Yujie Yang works primarily with lamp-worked borosilicate glass, cyanotype, and etching. She creates deliberate archives of ecological loss, fragile records designed to eventually fail. Glass embodies the temporal paradox at the heart of her practice. Once molten sand solidifies under flame, that transformation is permanent. It cannot return to its original state. This irreversibility mirrors the logic of modern development, where progress produces local order by displacing entropy elsewhere, into ecosystems and species that have no voice in the transaction. Yvette's conceptual framework stems from multicultural perspectives. Living and working between China, Cyprus, and now the UK, she has witnessed how industrial transformation unfolds differently across geographies and the invisible costs that accompany it. Wetlands are drained for farmland. Forests are cut down to build factories. Her practice remains attentive to these obscured spaces, not from a position of moral superiority critiquing post-industrial progress, but asking how we could mourn for what was lost when preservation is no longer possible. Yvette's practice evolved from attempting documentation in Fragments, through resisting transformation in Ephemeral, to seeking coexistence in Stillness of the Wind—a progression from preservation to witnessing, and remaining present with what cannot be saved. Glass as a material may appear permanent, but her sculptures remain visibly fragile, following the same laws as the ecosystems they reference. Once broken, they cannot be mended.

Yvette's work neither idealises progress nor romanticises an unindustrialised past. She positions herself at the crossroads of industrial modernity, refusing to look away from its aftermath. From this difficult, unromantic starting point, her work asks how we might continue forward, while acknowledging both what development has given us and what it has erased.