Xiao Yang : As Within, So Without

Name: Xiao Yang : As Within, So Without
Start: 2026-03-07T18:00:00-05:00
End: 2026-03-07T21:00:00-05:00
Location: 334 Connecticut street, Buffalo, NY, United States, New York 14213

Schedule

Sat Mar 07 2026 at 06:00 pm to 09:00 pm

UTC-05:00

Location

334 Connecticut street, Buffalo, NY, United States, New York 14213 | Buffalo, NY

Yang’s practice reflects her ongoing negotiation of a dual cultural identity that rooted in the traditions of the East while reshaped by life in the West. Her work arises from the tension between cultural belonging and estrangement, where the artist feels both alienated from her origins and perpetually peripheral within the culture she inhabits. This internal dissonance becomes the central force driving her art, manifesting as a spatial and material instability within the painted field, an echo of the condition that what unfolds within is inseparable from what unfolds without.
Through an intuitive process, Yang seeks equilibrium between these conflicting forces. Using translucent layers, she constructs a breathing pictorial space in which figuration, micro-organic motifs, and abstraction alternately surface and dissolve. The fluid, unnameable forms evoke the uncanny situated between the familiarity of the Western environment she adapts to and the
fading immediacy of her oriental heritage. These formations operate as both reflections of identity and projections of emotion, sometimes dissolving into pigment, sometimes flickering like spectral remnants suspended between presence and disappearance.
Her exploration of microbial and cosmic symbiosis transforms abstraction into a theater of scale. Drifting micro-worlds in ink suggest that the macrocosm and the individual microcosm are
governed by the same underlying principles, echoing one another across scale and form. This structural mirroring recalls the Hermetic axiom “as above, so below; as within, so without,”
proposing that the dynamics shaping the universe are reflected within the human psyche and, increasingly, within the digital systems that condition contemporary life.
Yang further interrogates the role of abstraction in the age of artificial intelligence. Through the organic formations of experimental ink, she articulates a visual resistance to data-driven logic. The tension between spontaneous diffusion and intentional intervention parallels the enduring dialectic between human consciousness and machine calculation. Just as microbes exist in
symbiosis with the body, humanity now navigates algorithmic ecologies that both sustain and regulate perception.
The uncontrollable nature of ink becomes a material assertion of agency. Resistant to algorithmic parsing, her abstract forms embody spiritual folds shaped by bicultural experience. In their
refusal to resolve into fixed data, they stand as quiet yet insistent affirmations of artistic autonomy—where inner and outer worlds, macro and micro systems, remain in constant correspondence rather than collapse.