Yiyi Wei is an interdisciplinary artist born and raised in China. She received a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design Glass Department, where she began to consider her artworks as processes that perceive the entangled connections between human and non-human existences. Weaving between the tangible and the transient, Yiyi Wei explores performances, interactive installations, and poetic writings to contemplate our posture within a system of symbiotic relationships across time and culture. Wei considers cross-discipline research and communication as important activities in her studio practice. She has collaborated with neurologists and biologists and fostered relationships through conversations with historians, geologists, and botanists for research projects.
Yiyi Wei was honored with scholarships to Pilchuck Glass School and Penland School of Craft to enrich her creative vocabulary in communities of artists. She was awarded Maharam STEAM fellowship 2019 to work collaboratively with Wildlife Conservation Society, based in New York’s Bronx Zoo, and their Tibetan branch at Chang Tang Plateau. In 2021, Yiyi Wei received a virtual residency Conversations in Practice, from Ox-Bow, where she continuously worked through her experience in Chang Tang and conversed with other artists on performance, grief, and body. Wei has exhibited her work at Flux Factory in Queens, NY; Woods-Gerry gallery, The Wurks, and Gelman Gallery in Providence, RI. She also co-curated “Mind the [ ]” at the Wurks gallery. She currently resides in Brooklyn, New York, and works as a freelance artist, glass fabricator, and studio technician at Brooklyn Glass.