A Dream Validates Itself as Shadows, video installation at the Institute for Public Architecture, 2025, Yitian Yan
In the flickering light of a traditional Chinese rolling lantern, artist Yitian Yan finds interpretation and discovers a symbolism for the diasporic experience, one that exists between ancient heritage and contemporary displacement. Through performance, video, and installation work, Yan changes the way we see objects by incorporating community narratives, transforming the historical instrument of war training into vessels where collective memories and dreams can live on. At the heart of Yan's practice revolves a deep engagement with the rolling lantern system developed in Song Dynasty China. Initially invented for dam enforcement and military training, these lanterns symbolized both growth and destruction and were used to demonstrate military might. Yan's intervention is both material and conceptual. By simplifying the bamboo structure to its most basic form while retaining the primary rolling mechanism, the artist creates space for new stories to emerge. Her lantern sculptures, now less opaque, allow a view of the burning fire within and the printed textiles without.
This series culminates in the video piece "A Dream Validates Itself as Shadows," which the artist developed from the earlier performance piece "Hold a Piece of the Sunset." While both series revolve around the creation of the lantern sculpture from the artist’s 2023 Lower Manhattan Cultural Council residency, "A Dream Validates Itself as Shadows" pushes beyond bodily interaction into layered narrative spaces. The work utilizes written words as portals, allowing urban sites and memories to intersect throughout. As Yan’s work unfolds, the rolling lantern's horizontal movement becomes a metaphor for diasporic experience, maintaining balance as it navigates changing landscapes, from the festival gatherings in ancient China’s ink paintings to the fenced borders of Governors Island, New York. On the lantern covers, the artist printed pictures of downtown New York, especially the neon lights from Chinatown. When the lanterns light up, their glow mixes ancient memories with the hectic, transient modern life. Such blending of the ancient with the contemporary, traditional with the displaced, enhances what Yan regards as a study of "traditions displaced in migration."
Hold a piece of sunset, performance at The Arts Center, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, 2024, Yitian Yan
A Dream Validates Itself as Shadows, video installation at the Institute for Public Architecture, 2025, Yitian Yan
Performance plays an essential role in bringing these concepts to life. In "Hold a Piece of Sunset," Yan introduced a body-scale screen sculpture sharing the same structural form as the lantern. This rolling gesture comments on the mobility of visual information, tracing back to the invention of dome film during WWI as a training technique for war. Yan engages with Hito Steyerl's concept of groundlessness from "In Free Fall: A Thought Experiment on Vertical Perspective," in which Yan acknowledges our current reality as an endless cinema in which information diffuses with every second. The performance piece intentionally breaks the structure to intervene in linear storytelling. The movements are improvised, so the experience, combining real-time movement with projected videos, is transient. While video works can be screened anywhere, performing and viewing experiences can only happen in the present. Yan interrogates the visual spectacle in performance art and expands the stage border to enable the audience and the performer dissolve into a space for collective narratives.
A Dream Validates Itself as Shadows, performative screening at the Performance Project, 2025, Yitian Yan, Photo Credit to SD Herzog
A Dream Validates Itself as Shadows, performative screening at the Performance Project, 2025, Yitian Yan, Photo Credit to SD Herzog
A Dream Validates Itself as Shadows, video installation at the Institute for Public Architecture, 2025, Yitian Yan
This participatory approach is strongly present in various installments of "A Dream Validates Itself as Shadows." At Speyer Hall on Manhattan's Lower East Side, the performative screening addressed a neighborhood with a large Chinese diasporic population for whom lantern culture is part of their collective memory. At Governors Island's Block House, the projection responded to a room of mirrors, representing a conscious gaze into the building’s memories of its military purposes during the Civil War. In both installments, site-specificity is untethered from physicality. As Yan asserts, "In diasporic experience, site is no longer bound to physicality; site is people."
In Yan’s video installation and performance works, under ever-changing light and shadow, audience members’ mental spaces intertwined into a panoramic performative happening. The artist asks: "Each person dreams their own dream; can we all be in the same dream together?" What emerges is the exiled meditation of the Chinese poet Li Yu during wartime: “in a dream, I forgot I was a guest”. Yan explores how the idea of homeland becomes a dream for the exiled and the migrants. The peaceful preservation of the fire wherein the spirits were kept at a safe distance of bones and skins “remains an eternal wish still in the light of our current world. "In Yan's hands, the lantern illuminates not just traditions displaced in migration, but spaces where communities can gather in collective dreaming.
Yitian Yan is an interdisciplinary artist creating research-based, community-centered public art. She has exhibited and performed at the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Arts Center (US), the Institute for Public Architecture (US), Castel Belasi (IT), Power Station of Art (Shanghai, CN), Photo LA (Los Angeles, US), and the Art Institute of Chicago (US). Her work is in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago. Yan received an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2018 and currently lives and works in New York.
