OBSESSED — Youyi Echo Yan

OBSESSED
Zepster Gallery, 220 Bogart Street, East Williamsburg, Brooklyn
Curated by Shelby Nelson Ward
October 24- November 17 , 2024
Press release
Whitehot Magazine: “Obsessed at Zepster Gallery”
IMPLUSE Magazine: ““I’ll Be Your Mirror”: A Group Show at Zepster Gallery Looks Inward”

Prime Cut Cattle
2023
Paper clay, metal, flocking fiber, silicone, found jewelry display cabinet
15” x 18” x 49”

From David Jager, Whitehot Magazine of Contemporary Art:

“Youyi Echo Yan centers the show with one of the sculptural works. She presents an elaborate lacquered antique cabinet made from wood, haunted by tendrils of black organic sludge snaking around its interior. If the cabinet is an allegory for the body, the sludge appears to symbolize something sinister and invasive—an internal drama along the lines of the “Venom” movies seems to be suggested here. Or she could simply be referring to Jung’s idea of the shadow, the chthonic impulses that haunt our well-organized and compartmentalized psyches. It’s telling that the same snake-like tendril is on the outside of the box, forming a handle, suggesting it is a key of some sort.”

From A.E. Chapman, IMPULSE Magazine:

Youyi Echo Yan’s Prime Cut Cattle (2023), a four-foot-tall vanity chest complete with a mirror on its front, sits at the center of the gallery propped open, revealing wooden shelves painted bright red that dissect the interior of the large case into sections. Mounds and tendrils of a mysterious black substance ooze over these shelves with accessory hooks sticking out. Yan’s cabinet of curiosity opens up allusions to the shadow self—unconscious parts of our personality repressed as a result of the ego’s assessment of them as less than ideal. In his book The Archetypes and the Collective Unconsciousness, Carl Jung describes the shadow self as:

“[A] tight passage, a narrow door, whose painful constriction no one is spared who goes down to the deep well. But one must learn to know oneself in order to know who one is. For what comes after the door is, surprisingly enough, a boundless expanse full of unprecedented uncertainty, with apparently no inside and no outside, no above and no below, no here and no there, no mine and no thine, no good and no bad.”

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