Bio
b. 1996, USA
V Yeh is an artist whose practice/praxis is in dialogue with science, medicine, and the visual and performance arts. His multimodal work grapples with normativity, artificial delineations—both scientific and cultural—and the material reality of specific bodyminds. Yeh was awarded the Louis Sudler Prize in the Arts and Eugene Leake Award upon graduating from Johns Hopkins University in 2019 with a BA in Medicine, Science, and the Humanities, and an MFA in Painting and Printmaking at the Yale School of Art.
Statement
Like a soft but firm tap right below one’s knee at the doctor’s office, I want to think of my work as a mallet that startles one into a space of reflexivity, involuntary and unbidden as the jerk of a knee.
Fortunately, I’m too suspicious of images to be a visual artist. What seems familiar never is, and is never unfraught. Accordingly: each work is an objective, empirical, detached love letter to the anarchic connotations of signs. Both a particle and a wave, unfixable and unobservable in its totality the more directly it’s perceived, each incongruous piece is better surveilled, disdainfully, out of the corner of one’s eye.
But if public exhibition(ism) of normative bodyminds can be considered social practice, or even praxis, then perhaps I am a social practitioner—no, a material-semiotic social scientist. My work is, after all, about incontrovertible scientific facts and truth, proved through rigorous, unbiased, democratically peer-reviewed, controlled, double-blind, randomized studies of average people. My practice is a meta-analysis of hard and certain truths that have remained unchanged for millenia: physics, statistics, probability, medicine, nature, abnormality, reality, race, and sex.
Ruptures, disjunctures, and paradigm shifts that make up the unwhole body—the message is always embodied in the medium (median) of you.
Or, in a different flavor:
Artificial delineations—the body and mind, art and science, natural and unnatural, normal and abnormal—are what I’m obsessed with. My practice and interests are an assemblage of incongruous parts, that are nonetheless indivisible, indissoluble, all of a piece. I’m especially intent on exploring the specificity that bodily existence confers—a specificity shaped by normative ontologies (probability and statistics, the medical-industrial-complex, etc.) that marginalize certain bodyminds as deviant. Through the lens of my own positionality, I probe at the seams and sutures of that insidious differencing within the public (un)consciousness, to make visible or discomfitingly invisible the lived, material realities that result. I enjoy using different modes and methods, sometimes paint, other times words, but always text, as alternate entry points into the same exquisite corpse of concepts I’m constantly grappling with, paralleling the structures and apparati by which knowledge is created and validated by various institutions. Sitting with the unknowability of (my) specific, illegible experiences—those mediated by social attitudes and constructions yet cannot be fully reduced to them—I ask the viewer to similarly risk abjection and flourish.
Education
2024 MFA Painting/Printmaking, Yale University, New Haven, CT
2019 BA Medicine, Science, and the Humanities, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD
Awards, Grants, Fellowships
2024 School of Art Special Activities Fund Grant
LGBTQ Studies Faculty and Graduate Student Workshops Grant
2023 Yale Thesis Fund Grant
2019 Louis Sudler Prize in the Arts
Eugene Leake Award
2018 NYAA Vincent Desiderio Master Class, Full Tuition Scholarship
Exhibition History
Solo Exhibitions
2024 Induction, Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University, New Haven, CT
Group Exhibitions
2024 [TBD], SPURS, Beijing, China (forthcoming)
…… And the Dogs Were Silent, David Castillo, Miami, FL
Surface Trouble, Yossi Milo, New York, NY
and the forms which linger / humming in our ears, Green Hall Gallery at Yale University, New Haven, CT
2023 Second Thoughts, Green Hall Gallery at Yale University, New Haven, CT
Sip From the Skull: Chapter I, Tipsy Shanghai 6, New York, NY
2022 Blanket Statement, Green Hall Gallery at Yale University, New Haven, CT
Bibliography
New American Paintings, MFA Annual Issue #165, April/May 2023
Artist Talks, Lectures, Workshops
2024 “Death Drawing,” Pose, Power, Practice: New Perspectives on Life Drawing Symposium, panelist, The Courtald Institute of Art, Vernon Square, London, June 17.
Oil Painting on Paper, Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, CT, May 2.
Figure Drawing for the Medical Humanities Workshop, Yale University, New Haven, CT, April 18.
Classical Oil Painting Workshop (Intermediate Painting), Yale University, New Haven, CT, April 15.
Lecture/Presentation, 3rd Annual Symposium for Disability and Accessibility at Yale, Yale University, New Haven, CT, April 11.
Classical Oil Painting Workshop, Yale University, New Haven, CT, March 29.
Thesis Panel + Tour, Yale University, New Haven, CT, January 24.
2023 Figure Drawing for the Medical Humanities Workshop, Yale University, New Haven, CT, May 2.
2022 Lecture/Presentation, Cortex Collective, Yale University, New Haven, CT, November 5.