Belongings
Curated by Larry Lee

Belongings is a deeply personal and conceptual investigation into care, control, and the emotional legacies passed down through maternal relationships. In this solo exhibition, interdisciplinary artist Yidi Wang constructs a speculative environment where distinctions between human and non-human, self and mother, gradually dissolve. Using soft, skin-like materials and suspended anatomical forms, Wang questions the very nature of what it means to belong—to a physical body, to a familial lineage, and to a system of caregiving.

Wang, originally from China, is a interdisciplinary artist, educator, and curator whose practice spans performance, interactive technology, and sculpture. She holds an MFA in Emerging Technologies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC), where her creative direction evolved from using design to solve social issues toward integrating her technological knowledge into experimental works about the body and language in spatial contexts.

Her installations have been shown at multiple venues, including the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Mana Contemporary’s Midwest Fair, No Nation Art Gallery, Tangential Unspace Lab, Barbagelata Contemporary Art Foundation in Barcelona, EEA Gallery in New York, and the Caroline S. Mark Gallery in Wisconsin. Her work and artistic philosophy have been featured in Artwork Gallery and AI-Tiba9 Magazine.

At the core of Belongings is the psychological and somatic landscape between mother and child. Wang explores the intangible yet formative forces—expectation, sacrifice, and generational memory—that shape maternal identity. Sculptures made of silicone are sewn into pouch-like vessels, pulled into forms that resemble stretched tissue or dormant organs. These pieces do not mimic the human body directly; instead, they trace its voids, its fragmentation, and its emotional residues.

In reimagining motherhood, Wang moves beyond biology, approaching it instead as an evolving, relational state—capable of both nourishment and annihilation. Her work dwells in a posthuman framework, where acts of care are not contingent on ownership or duty. Instead, they are ephemeral, open-ended, and marked by gestures of tending, growing, and release.

Belongings intentionally resists tidy conclusions. Wang’s work holds space for the contradictions within intimacy: the craving for closeness versus the fear of enmeshment, the security of structure versus the suffocation of control. By inviting viewers to inhabit this tension, Wang offers a quiet but radical proposition: that care can be decoupled from dominance, that belonging can be chosen rather than inherited, and that our bodies—and the narratives tied to them—can be reshaped, redefined, and reimagined.

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Tags: Yidi Wang Solo Exhibition