Bio
Yolanda Ren (b. 2002) is a Chinese-Canadian multidisciplinary artist currently based in Toronto. She completed her BA in 2025 at the University of Toronto, Canada, specializing in Philosophy with a minor in Visual Studies. 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.
A major theme that underlies all of 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 affects 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 my 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.
EDUCATION
2025 Honors Bachelor of Arts (HBA): Philosophy Specialist, Visual Studies Minor & Mathematics Minor, University of Toronto St. George Campus, Toronto, Canada
SELECTED EXHIBITIONS
2025 An Exhibition to the Wildlife (photo series), Chen’s Residential Compound Image Project, BYOB, Yunnan, China
Gallery Thursday, Rchive, Toronto, Canada
An Exhibition to the Wildlife, The Narrows Residency, Nelson, Canada
Social Sculpture (2025), North Borden Building, University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada
2024 Private Public Space, EEL Gallery, University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada
Social Sculpture (2024), EEL Gallery, University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada
We Are a Community, Thesis exhibition, North Borden Building, University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada
Gazes, Thesis exhibition, University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada
Mad Women’s Feast, group performance & feast, University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada
2023 Have You Seen…, Thesis Exhibition, Bahen Centre of Information Technology, University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada
2022 Finals, North Borden Building, University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada
PUBLICATIONS
2024 Mad Women’s Feast, self-published zine, University of Toronto Library Archive, John M. Kelly Library, Toronto, Canada
RESIDENCIES & PROGRAMS
2025 Design Fabrication Zone, Toronto Metropolitan University, Toronto, Canada
The Narrows Artist Residency, Nelson, Canada
DesignTO Youth ‘Otherworld’, Toronto, Canada
Artist-in-Residence (Private Residency), Beijing, China
Portfolio in pdf
