aura of after progress
Saturday, November 15, 2025 | Doors: 6:30 | $10 Tickets - NOTAFLAF
Join us at Vox Populi for a screening of artist Yolanda Yang’s newly produced video, which explores the intersection of dust, labor, and consumption behind the scenes at RAIR (Recycled Artist in Residence). The program features a post-screening conversation with Joyce Chung, Connie Yu, and Ricky Yanas, reflecting on how artists and thinkers engage with urban ruins and waste during moments of structural crisis.
Through discussing readings, performance, and time-based practices, the participants will consider the ongoing nature of ruin and the material unconscious embedded in our built environments.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Yolanda He Yang is an installation and performance artist. Born and raised in a Catholic family in North China, Yolanda relocated to various places that she remembered as homes, schools, and playgrounds when she was a child.
Her work employs the hidden power of subtlety and ephemerality that often tie to the labor, materiality and storytelling. Her site-responsive practice has evolved through residencies that attune to the distinct material and social conditions of each place — from prehistoric sites in Cairo and Luxor, Egypt, to a demolition and construction recycling site at RAIR (PA), to cornfields at Villkulla Residency (NE), and an upcoming residency in nature at the Marble House Project (VT). Through these contexts, her research process engages observation, embodied response, and collaboration with local environments to uncover the layered temporalities and ecologies embedded within each site.
Yolanda’s work has been exhibited in both public and indoor places, including Harvard Square, Brookline Arts Center, The Rose Kennedy Greenway, Vox Populi in Philadelphia, Villekulla Farm in Nebraska, Artists Studio in Cairo & Luxor, Wind H Art Center, MG Space in Beijing, Flux Factory in New York, Rockwell in Somerville among others.
She is a recipient of Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Opportunity Fund from Mayor Office of Arts and Culture in City of Boston, Collective Future Funds Ongoing Platform Grant, Boston Chinatown Community Grant, and Cambridge Arts Association among others. As a recently awarded 2025 MassCreative fellow, she continues to lead Behind VA Shadows, a community public art project amplifying the creative voices of frontline staff in nonprofit art museums and organizations. She holds MS’21 in Arts Administration and MFA in Sculpture 24’ from Boston University.
PANELISTS
Ricky Yanas is a Mexican-American artist, curator and cultural organizer living in Philadelphia. Working within a pragmatic tradition of problem finding, his work extends through a variety of disciplines (photography, documentary film, installation, archival investigation, and place-making) with the aim to create inter-sectional/inter-historical spaces of inquiry, mutual engagement, and collaboration through collective art making and ideological exploration.
Yanas' projects include “Extension or Communication: Puerto Rico” at Tiger Strikes Asteroid Gallery Philadelphia and Taller Puertorriqueno (2018) and “The Green Sun” (2019-ongoing), a collaboration with artist Kristen Neville-Taylor, that brings together practitioners from environmental and creative sectors to re-envision the role of energy in our lives - past, present and future. Most recently, he co-curated “An Exchange of Shifting Atmospheres” (2021-2023), with Leslie Moody Castro, at Tiger Strikes Asteroid Philly. The exhibition centered on the artistic collaborations between five artist pairs working in Philadelphia and Mexico City.
In 2016, Yanas founded Ulises, a bookstore and curatorial project, with Nerissa Cooney, Lauren Downing, Joel Evey, Kayla Romberger and Gee Wesley. In May of 2024, Ulises re-opened their storefront location at the Ray building in the South Kensington neighborhood of Philadelphia.
Connie Yu is a writer and artist based in Philadelphia. Their practice takes place in poetry and printmaking, cooking and strength training, and takes shape from the administrative aspects of these data — asking the limits and series of work and its measure, measure and its work. They have shown in group exhibitions at ArtYard, William Way LGBT Community Center, Asian Arts Initiative, TILT Institute for the Contemporary Image, AUTOMAT, and Vox Populi. Read their writing in the chapbook modest technologies, 1 thru 3 (Neighboring Systems, 2019), and in the online directory Conflicts of Interest.
Connie curates, edits, and publishes work by/for queer and trans Asian artists with their print collective FORTUNE, which they co-founded in 2019; and operates to its small-scale risograph imprint Many Folds Press. They are currently the Program Director of the Velocity Fund, a Regional Regranting Program that offers direct-to-artist grants. In this work, they are committed to sharing resources and asking questions that can make arts programs, grants, and projects more accessible, and attentive, to more people.
Joyce Chung is Curator at Asian Arts Initiative, where she leads the organization’s exhibition and performance programs. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, Chung aims to examine how capitalism and power structures shape lived experiences, creating platforms where art fosters social inquiry and collective engagement. Drawn to performance and time-based media for their capacity to position the body as a site of resistance, reconciliation, and embodied memory, she focuses on underrepresented communities—particularly ethnic and gender minorities—and champions work that challenges normative frameworks. Chung has held curatorial roles at organizations such as the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (Seoul), Gwangju Biennale, Hyundai Card (Seoul), Kukje Gallery (Seoul), and Performa (New York). She holds an MA in the Humanities from the University of Chicago and a BA in Art History from Wesleyan University.
