Dearest

My studio practice includes interactive soft sculpture, performance, and works on paper. I create sensory experiences that allude to sensations such as weightiness, pressure, and simple gestures like hugging and hiding. I emphasize tactility to conceptually address a displaced sense of self and a universal search for belonging. Tactility is paramount in my work because it is both intimate yet compromising.
The work provides opportunities to find humor in hardship and empathy in embarrassment and prompts dialogue concerning social and bodily awkwardness. By interacting with my tactile sculptures, viewers make themselves vulnerable in a public space. Such vulnerability prompts introspection and reveals ways in which people engage with their own bodies, other bodies, and physical and psychological spaces.

Artist Biography

Anna Youngyeun is a Thai-Chinese Asian-American artist born in Hawaii and raised in Missouri.  She received a BFA in Fibers at Truman State University in Kirksville, MO and her MFA in Textiles at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, KS. Her work emphasizes tactility in order to examine personal and universal themes of living an amalgamated existence at an intersection of converging identities.  Her special research interests include intersectional identity, sexuality, fat and size studies, and sensory experiences.