Yolanda Ren (b. 2002, she/her) is an emerging multidisciplinary artist based in Toronto. She completed her BA in 2025 at the University of Toronto, Canada, specializing in Philosophy with a minor in Visual Studies, and will begin her MFA at the School of Art Institute Chicago in Fall 2026. Her practice uses installations and performances, with emphasis on interactivity, to depict systemic alienation under neoliberal capitalism, and consequently exploring new possibilities for human connection and collective experience.
She is so emerging that she has yet to exhibit "formally" in major galleries, and is still very much experimenting, exploring, and playing in her studio, and will leave the accomplishments section of this bio blank for now.
A major theme that underlies all her works concerns critiquing the systematic alienation inherent in neoliberal capitalism, i.e., how human relations are reduced to commodified exchanges and therefore alienates us. These fields/spaces that she creates and frames as artworks are meant to be temporary gaps within the frame of society, something resembling a community or a “micro-utopia”, where aspects of society from which she feels alienated in the current capitalist world are brought forward and critiqued/challenged by participants, potentially co-constructing unconventional modes of interaction among themselves. These spaces both deconstruct how societal power structures affect human bonds, and propose decentralized interaction as an alternative, emphasizing collective experience beyond capitalist frameworks.
On the other hand, her works have interactivity or viewers participation as a conceptual necessity. By constructing artworks as “social experiments” that set up a field both physically and conceptually, she wants to fulfill the role of a “facilitator” by transferring her authority as an artist to the viewers. Her works are constantly evolving spaces whose visual outcomes depend greatly on participants’ actions, as she designs the spaces to imply that participants have full agency to act in any way. By this, she wishes for viewers to be more than mere triggers of predetermined responses by pushing a button or showing up for the camera, etc., which happen in most interactive works.
C.V. & Portfolio in pdf
Contact
I'm open to collaborate if you
- want to do an experimental project in any direction together
- are a curator, event host, exhibition venue owner, creative director, brand partner, etc.
If you also would like to
- Buy printed postcards/photographs of my works from me
- Be invited to my future artworks and/or experimental practices (before the works are created), as either a participant or viewer (virtually or in person)
Find me here ->