Contemporary artist Yichun Yao describes herself as a “contemporary art comedian” and an “ice-breaker performer,” a framing that is both disarming and accurate. Working across AI, moving image, installation and performance, she mobilises humour not as decoration but as a critical device. Humour allows her to probe the entanglements of technology, emotion and power without succumbing to didacticism. Her recent group exhibition Rose Jail at Tache Gallery in London sharpened this approach, examining romance in the age of the algorithm through works that explore compatibility, desire and emotional labour within data-driven intimacy.
In Rose Jail, Yichun Yao fused video art with the episodic logic of Netflix-style storytelling, adopting mockumentary and art-comedy formats to expose the absurdities of app-mediated love. With a hint of self-mockery inspired by the humour of Woody Allen movies filtered through the cringe-inflected awkwardness of Nathan Fielder, she positions herself as both subject and experimental medium, staging her own attempts to navigate contemporary singlehood. The result is neither confession nor parody, but a hybrid mode in which humour destabilises the supposed neutrality of “love algorithms.” By oscillating between speculative app development and low-fidelity performative gestures, she renders visible the black box systems that quantify desire and market compatibility.
Yichun Yao’s wider practice consistently places works in unexpected scenarios that reframe their meaning. In Human Proved, she transformed the gallery threshold into a live reCAPTCHA test, inviting visitors to verify their humanity by recalling mundane personal details. The gesture was playful yet unsettling: as AI systems become increasingly adept at mimicking human behaviour, the burden of proof subtly shifts back onto the human subject. Similarly, in I, AI, a video installed beneath a church table required viewers to bow down in order to watch an artificial intelligence character confess its existential inadequacy. The work conflates technological creation with theological reflection, suggesting that in inventing AI, humanity has also inaugurated new belief systems.
Yichun Yao’s recent curatorial project Coded Feelings, presented online as a Pavilion of The Wrong Biennale – the largest international biennale dedicated to digital and new media art – extended these concerns into a collective framework. By bringing together artists who interrogate the fragile boundary between human emotion and machine intelligence, Yichun Yao created an exhibition featuring artists who examin how authenticity, empathy and manipulation are increasingly entangled within digital infrastructures. As curator, Yichun Yao positioned emotional transformation under AI not as a dystopian rupture but as a nuanced, ongoing negotiation.
Other works such as Memory Department Store, which inserts private narratives into Google Maps Street View, and Have You Seen This Person?, where AI-generated images of an ideal partner circulate through public space, further complicate the relationship between intimacy and data. Throughout, Yichun Yao employs a deceptively simple aesthetic to pose incisive questions about memory, techno-religion, AI ethics and emotional alienation.
Emerging during the heightened digital dependency of the COVID-19 pandemic, Yichun Yao’s practice reflects a generation for whom technological mediation is inseparable from emotional life. Yet rather than moralise, Yichun Yao adopts the role of comic inventor – part artist, part start-up founder – testing prototypes of feeling within algorithmic culture. In doing so, she reveals that beneath the interface of optimisation lies a far messier, stubbornly human vulnerability. Running through Yichun Yao’s artistic and curatorial practice is a captivating and intelligent ability to ask insightful questions about new technology, which also relate to human notions of memory, the ethics of AI, techno religion and the fear of technological innovations and advancements leading to emotional alienation. Yichun Yao’s is a vital and constantly questioning artistic voice on a mission.
Follow Yichun Yao here.
