based in
Beijing & Berkeley
portfolio
Getting to know the world through a time of mass-transformation in Beijing, where walls were torn down and rebuilt overnight, the semblance of solidity in human construction was dispelled for her early on. The profanity of permanence—whether in definitions, feelings, walls, or boundaries—became the exigent site where her work emerges.
She is interested in the traces that lie upon the surfaces of the world, those residues of time, chance, or negligence that reveal a construction, and gives hint to the potentiality of a de- and re-construction. In her work, she diverts the gaze to configure a poetics already present in the everyday, playing with familiarity and its capacity to obscure and make things disappear, to move our bodies as it leverages our inherent blindness to what is known and agreed upon. With sculpture and moving image configured in “situations”, she pushes and pulls those thresholds of recognition, borrowing familiar traces and reworking them into new affective encounters.
Yiming Clara is looking for that world which is revealed only through sensory channels–one made by a language that is beyond the strictures of linguistics and exists in those visceral reactions, the flashes of memory, a feeling on the skin, and those appearances in dreams.
Her work has been shown at Climate Control Gallery and FOG Fair (San Francisco); Upcoming shows include 500 Capp Street Foundation (San Francisco, 2026), Slash Art /Room/ (San Francisco, 2026), and Recology Artist in Residence (San Francisco, 2026). She runs the exhibition series 202019: Occasions.
On Objects and Questions
On Language