Yale-China Arts Lab 2026

The Yale-China Arts Lab is a unique opportunity for emerging professional artists at Yale’s four graduate arts schools to create original work engaging Chinese culture. The residency supports the creation of new intercultural work that – in process and presentation – brings together students, artists, and audiences from New Haven, Yale, and the world.

Amy Fang

Amy Fang is an interdisciplinary artist and designer whose practice examines the fashioning and unfashioning of the racialized body.

Fang’s work draws on the sociocultural histories of stretch fabrics, recontextualizing these materials as “second skins,” and as a form of shanzhai—a Chinese term for counterfeit, or a poor imitation. Her research investigates the ways in which material signifiers of status undergo shifts in value through cross-cultural circulation. Through this lens Fang foregrounds the fragile, wistful, and often tenuous relationships between disseminated copies and their original sources. She is a graduate of the UCLA Design | Media Arts program, an attendee of 2025 SOMA Summer, and is currently pursuing her MFA at the Yale School of Art. Previously, Fang was the senior designer at T: the New York Times Style Magazine. Her past collaborators also include Hermès, the Swiss Institute, Calvin Klein, and the Hammer Museum.

Camille J-M Gwise

Camille is an interdisciplinary designer. Her practice collages material processes of drawing, writing, printmaking, and performance in service of making images, both still and moving. She works independently and with others to make books, installations, performances, visual identities, and the occasional typeface.

Joy Li

Joy Li was born in 1999 in Gansu, China. She obtained her BFA degree in Interdisciplinary Sculpture with a Theater minor at Maryland Institute College of Art in 2021. She is currently studying in the MFA Sculpture program at Yale School of Art, expected to graduate in 2026. Her works include sculpture, performance art, theater, video, and music, exploring the tension of interactions between objects, emotions, and relationships. In her works, she reinterprets objects and bodies to magnify the allure and danger inherent in everyday items, allowing the audience to re-experience and interact with familiar things in unfamiliar ways.

Her recent solo exhibitions include:  “Gas Station X”, 2024, Vanguard Gallery, Shanghai; “Icarus" Wings”, 2024, Guangdong Times Museum, Guangzhou; “Green Water”, 2023, LINSEED, Shanghai; “Golden Lines and White Lightings”, 2023, Aranya, Chengde; !Salomé”, 2022, 33ml OFFSPACE, Shanghai; “Collective Dreaming”, 2020, BBOX, Baltimore; “The Skin of a Human Being”, 2019, Gateway Gallery 1, Baltimore. Her selected group exhibitions include: “Porsche “Young Chinese Artist of the Year” Nominees’ Exhibition”, Shanghai Exhibition Center, Shanghai; “Four Winds: a Different Perspective on Southern Art”, 2024, Guangdong Contemporary Art Center, Guangzhou; “Open the Door”, 2024, Gallery func, Shanghai; “At the beginning, you find nothing there”, 2024, Petitree, Shenzhen; !Embodies Rituals”, 2024, Guangdong Times Museum, Guangzhou; “After Human: Marks of the Beasts”, 2024, Tomorrow Maybe.

Shellie Zhang

Shellie Zhang is a multidisciplinary artist based in Toronto and New Haven. Through a diverse range of media, Zhang explores how histories of translation, migration, and memory leave traces and impressions. Her work examines the processes of integration and assimilation, the ways culture is learned, sustained, and negotiated, how manifestations of these ideas relate to lived experiences and how symbols and icons are remembered, inherited and preserved. Zhang’s recent work investigates the surface as a charged site where connections between the decorative, ornamentation, glamour, and bodies are projected, learned, and inherited. By merging symbols and motifs of transformation, adornment, and the decorative from the natural world with human-made materials, Zhang explore a lineage of surface metamorphosis that moves between the organic and the fabricated and the metaphors of adaptability and resiliency that come with it.

Zhang has exhibited at venues including Asian Art Initiative (Philadelphia) and the Institute of Contemporary Art San Diego. She is a recipient of grants such as the Toronto Arts Council’s Visual Projects grant, the Ontario Arts Council’s Visual Artists Creation Grant and the Canada Council’s Project Grant to Visual Artists. Zhang was an Artist-in-Residence at the Art Gallery of Ontario (2017), received the Toronto Friends of the Visual Arts Artist Award (2021), and was longlisted for the Sobey Art Award (2025). Her work is in public collections such as the Robert McLaughlin Gallery and the McMaster Museum of Art. Her work has been published in Frieze, Canadian Art, the Toronto Star, Blackflash Magazine, CBC Arts, and C Magazine. Zhang is a founding board member of the Toronto Chinatown Land Trust.

Past Projects

Arts Lab Partners