Ying Ye is an interdisciplinary Chinese artist who takes her family tradition of cooking and farming into her artistry and explores the role of cooking and food in her life as an immigrant. She incorporates “cooking” and “farming” into her materials and art by creating interactive installations, performance art, and site-specific art through her body, video, text, objects, neon, ice, brick, clay, ingredients, service, and cooking supplies to make people engage, experience, smell, taste, socialize, reflect, and change their minds.
She is concerned with cultural identity, feminism, and how themes of place, home, and diaspora can cultivate form through the language of contemporary art. Her works address themes of urban development and racial and economic justice in art, and her works disturb the social structures and systemic racism in the public domain. She supports community building, community land trust, and collaboration with artists.
She creates an installation and site-specific art for community building where the communities and immigrants can gather together. Her installations and contexts create a space for people to engage, socialize, reflect, and change their minds. And she makes projects that are persuasive and thought-provoking while creating ways to question and challenge social norms and conventional uses of ordinary objects between Chinese and American cultures to examine identity, language, empathy, and embodiment.
As an artist of color, she strongly believes that her body itself is already a place of politics.