"Art is about connection—not just with oneself, but with others. It's about sharing passion within specific communities, like the queer community, and fostering a sense of collective care through exhibitions, screenings, and reading groups.”

In the 1973 film Reel Time by Annabel Nicolson, the artist, through the mechanical rhythm of a sewing machine, made visible the gendered labour role in image-making. By performing with a sewing machine, actually threading through film stock, the artist connected women's domestic work to film production. Similarly, Laura Mulvey & Peter Wollen's Riddles of the Sphinx (1977) addresses women’s position in patriarchy through experimental film, using psychoanalysis to challenge the current cinematic convention and the male gaze, becoming a milestone in experimental cinema.  Bridging this historical context to contemporary practices, Glasgow-based Chinese artist Yiyang Chen updates the 1970s feminist film theory, taking a post-internet framework where bodies are viewed as data - reclaiming haptic image generation as a form of protest. As Nicolson and Mulvey critique how women were being represented in photography and film, Chen transforms the body into the generative apparatus itself, marking a clear evolution from critique to active embodiment.

In the live performance and video installation, THE MAID, THE BRIDE, THE BODY (2022), Chen assigns the act of hand-sewing as the visual core of the work, to not only reveal labour but also to point out its distortion and fragmentation. In this work, inspired by Nicolson’s film, Reel Time, the body becomes a methodology. Bodily actions of sewing, and their continuous movements, do not seek to restore the fragmented images but rather emphasise “their fragmentation, instability, and heterogeneous collage.” By producing new images through this action, it generates a visual language that creates ways of seeing rather than merely being viewed. In this performance, Chen repetitively and continuously hand-sews fragments of images onto the surface of “an immaculately white hoop skirt,” which serves as both the surface and the carrier of images. In this surface, the reflected images are constantly being morphed into one another, metaphorically representing the act of visual creation and experimentation, while also constituting a reverse articulation of bodily experience within the grammar of images.

The theoretical framework of Chen's practices relies heavily on the concept of labour within vision by using domestic labor and transforming it into methodology. This visual morphology updates the feminist critique of Ukeles for post-digital conditions. Where Ukeles said "maintenance IS art," Chen demonstrates "labour GENERATES seeing”. Mierle Laderman Ukeles' foundational interventions used participatory art to make invisible domestic maintenance labour visible and art, enquiring about the gendered nature of care, maintenance culture, and labour (that she widely talks about in her manifesto). But where Ukeles elevated maintenance and labour to visibility through cleaning museums and photographing domestic scenes, Chen's critical shift is her interpretation, transforming sewing and the body itself in ways of seeing and questioning how seeing itself is intervened upon. Her sewing does not repair or maintain; it disrupts and marks. In this methodology, Chen does not use body and bodily action as narrative, but rather the production process is part of the viewing experience, leveraging the hand as a structure of viewing, revealing the mechanism of seeing through repetitive and slow actions.

In another work, MYTHS OF DISAVOWAL (2024), there is an evolution in the conceptual framework of Chen's practice. Where the bodily functions of kneading, scrubbing, and cleaning are not seen merely as a generation of images but as tactile intimacy. In this film, skin acts as an interface, a perpetual uncertainty. It not only questions the physiological boundaries of the body and its continuous contact between the action of tearing and kneading and the surface, but also how this act creates a highly intimate connection between skin and the material in the frame. Furthermore, these images do not follow a clear narrative path and a stable image structure, but a continuous uncertainty through discomfort. Where images become difficult to locate and their texture becomes the visual hallmark of the work. This is a clear refusal by the artist of a gaze-centred viewing posture.

In MYTHS OF DISAVOWAL, this tactile intimacy, recreated through the artist's filming angles and the use of sound and images, enacts what film theorist Laura Marks calls "haptic visuality". In this theory, vision operates like organs of touch, arguing that certain images appeal to the multisensory, embodied experience, giving space for the viewers to create their own surfaces rather than try to decipher the meanings behind the works. Yet Chen gives it another layer, extending it through Paul B. Preciado's concept of the body as a "pharmacopornographic platform". When her kneading hands interact with the other frame of moving image, they disrupt how racialised and female bodies are controlled through visual regimes. You cannot simply look at these images, as the blurred images and unstable frames refuse a comfortable gaze position; you have to experience the discomfort. This is haptic cinema for the post-digital era, where touch becomes epistemology.

If we look back to THE MAID, THE BRIDE, THE BODY, and its non-linear narrative progression, we notice that this is a conductor line within most of Chen's practice. In this specific work, a single action—threading a needle through fabric—repeats for minutes, creating what José Esteban Muñoz termed "queer temporality". By using repetition as perceptual delay, the artist refuses capitalist productivity and linear advancement, giving the viewers an experience of durational labour rather than edited highlights. Chen's work embraces an open-ended and processual narrative, remaining deliberately unfinished, relying on material friction and the body to guide the viewers through the work.

Operating within Glasgow's robust alternative art infrastructure with her studio at OuterSpaces and her recent exhibition Starter Pack at Six Foot Gallery in Glasgow, positions her at an interesting angle within the art community, prioritising experimental, process-based practices over commercial viability, which gives space for new visual language to emerge. Even more, Chen's doctoral research gives us another lens of her practice, as she focuses on examining mythology and monstrosity as alternative epistemologies that inform but do not dictate her artistic output. This marriage of aesthetic autonomy and theoretical rigour makes Chen's practice a rich dialogue and a playground for new film and moving image languages.

In our recent conversation, we discussed Chen's upcoming and ongoing work "BECOMING MONSTROUS (2025-2026)”, a film and live performance project. This performance explores themes of internal and external divisions, the real versus the illusory, and the transformative power of mythical tales, particularly focusing on cultural monsters and the empowerment they symbolise. Her location, body of work, and upcoming project position Chen within Glasgow's feminist/queer infrastructure and international diasporic networks, grounding her not as an emergent voice but already as a part of a vital generation reimagining experimental cinema's political possibilities.

Chen's upcoming Glasgow screenings also signal expanding recognition, while her multidisciplinary practice across painting, moving image, ceramics, performance, and writing suggests a refusal of medium-specificity as another form of disciplinary constraint. Through her uniquely calibrated "perceptual grammar"—where seeing becomes touching, labour becomes image, and slowness becomes resistance—Chen offers contemporary moving image practice a radical alternative to spectacle.

Learn more about the artist here. If you're in Glasgow, be sure to take a moment to visit her studio at OuterSpaces.

Cover image:

The Maid, The Bride, The Body. Live performance, film (22min), 2022. By Yiyang Chen.

All images courtesy of Yiyang Chen.