Suiyuan Jin (b. 1997, Linhai, China) is a New York-based sculptor working across sculpture, installation, and research-driven practice. She received her MFA in Sculpture from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2024 and is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Theatre and Performance at the CUNY Graduate Center. She teaches at Brooklyn College. Her work has been exhibited in Durham, Providence, and New York.
Could you introduce your practice and how your background in philosophy, sculpture, and performance studies informs your work?
My practice moves across sculpture, installation, and research-based projects. At its core is an interest in how objects and materials function as dramaturgical agents, generating relations, atmospheres, and narratives without relying on human protagonists.
In sculpture, I am drawn to encounters of texture, color, mass, and pattern. The casting method I developed uses clay or sand as negative molds and epoxy or polyurethane as both structure and binder. Through this process, fragments accumulate like the layered shell of a mollusk.
In this practice, matter tends to lead, and ideas follow. I am interested in a kind of spiritual materiality that emerges through tacit knowledge and direct contact with materials. Much of the work begins in manipulation and play: digging into sand, kneading clay, observing dents and stains, moving a small object back and forth in my hands. These gestures are not preliminary steps toward a concept. They are thinking in material form.
At times, the work takes the shape of sculptural systems composed of repeated components rather than a single enlarged form. A piece may extend across a room or imply multiplication, as in the lizard fountain where amphibian reliefs seem capable of spreading across an entire wall. In other instances, I focus on a singular object saturated with color, evoking sedimentary rock, toxic animal skins, or hybrid life forms drifting across geographies. Elements shaped directly by my fingers retain visible traces, allowing the mark of the hand to echo the act of sculpting itself. Retail craft items such as chess pieces or small animal figurines occasionally enter these assemblages, suggesting how objects quietly generate narratives around themselves and the lives they inhabit.
My background in philosophy began with an undergraduate degree, although what truly captivated me were ancient Greek philosophy, ritual, and theatre. Still, philosophy shaped how I think about perception, ontology, and the relationship between subject and object. Graduate training in sculpture taught me to think with my hands, through process, and through material resistance. It was also a period of intense looking and reading. I encountered many modern and contemporary artists whose work resonated deeply with me. Around that time, I began practicing operational drawing to train gesture and logic simultaneously, treating drawing as a system that unfolds through action.
My academic experience in Theatre and Performance Studies offers a framework for understanding these object-based works as performances in themselves. It encourages a continual re-examination of practice while remaining attentive to its conditions. At the same time, it instills caution toward over-explanation. There is always a temptation to stabilize meaning too quickly. I try to resist that impulse and allow the work to remain open, so that objects can perform rather than declare.
Your sculptures draw from myth, folklore, posthumanism, and object-centered theatre. What draws you to these frameworks, and how do they shape the narratives you build through objects?
When I look at myth and folklore, what draws me is the way they operate. Their narratives move through a logic that feels almost incantatory. I am interested in activating that structure of summoning rather than retelling specific stories.
In these traditions, objects, animals, and materials are never neutral. A stone, a box, or a thread can carry destiny or transformation. Matter is animated. This sensibility aligns closely with how materials behave in the studio. Posthumanist thought resonates here as well, dispersing authorship across bodies, objects, gravity, chemistry, and time. Meaning emerges through relation. Agency circulates.
Object-centered theatre provides a language for understanding how things perform. Scale, placement, fragility, and opacity shape atmosphere and tension. A small arrangement can imply a vast terrain. A miniature environment can condense biological movement, geological drift, spiritual gesture, or a pre-linguistic field of sensation.
What interests me is a sense that a structure is present even if it remains partially unarticulated. The forms lean toward the porous and the imperfect. They move through states of ecstatic distortion, layering, and sedimentation, allowing meaning to accumulate gradually.
You’ve developed a casting technique that combines resin with trash. What led you to this material approach, and what kinds of tensions or meanings emerge from it?
I have long admired the material sensitivity of post-minimalist artists, but resin occupies a different cultural space. It is a petroleum derivative, a twentieth-century substance without geological memory of its own. In contemporary art and DIY culture, it is everywhere. It often functions as a carrier, a binder, a substitute for glass. Transparent, viscous, solidifying at room temperature, capable of preserving what it contains, it promises permanence while remaining fundamentally artificial. It imitates stone, amber, and crystal. In this sense, it is already a parody of nature. Roland Barthes described plastic as the visible sign of transformation itself, and resin seems to extend that logic. What a future fossil. Precisely because of its ubiquity and its slightly kitsch aura, I am drawn to it. It remains one of the most beloved materials among makers, and I still feel close to that position of first encounter. Its glossy surface and liquid-to-solid magic can feel almost theatrical. I want to preserve that initial dizziness, the astonishment that arises when encountering a luminous, viscous substance that hardens as if by spell.
Casting with resin inevitably produces excess. Spills, drips, fragments, and sanding dust accumulate in the studio. Rather than discarding these remnants, I reintroduce them into the next casting cycle. Ground down and suspended again in liquid, they solidify once more. The process becomes circular, a sedimentary system in which waste is continually folded back into structure.
Alongside this internal recycling, I collect discarded matter from beaches and streets: plastic shards, kitchen scraps, hair from bathroom drains, clipped nails, dust. During casting, other materials are embedded into the resin: grains, coffee grounds, dried leaves, miniature figurines, and pills. These inclusions alter texture and opacity. The act feels partly material, partly psychological. At times, it carries the atmosphere of ritual, as if preservation and contamination were occurring simultaneously. The work holds tension between toxicity and care, permanence and decay, industrial production and intimate touch.
In some ways, this casting technique resembles the formation of a gall: a tumor-like growth that appears on plant tissue in response to irritation, shaped by the presence of a parasite. The structure emerges from disturbance. I sometimes imagine the work as a kind of material gall, an excrescence formed through contact and intrusion. The maker occupies an ambiguous position, not entirely sovereign but closer to a parasitic presence within an existing system. The object thickens around what it absorbs.
With your interest in theatre and performance, how do you think about sculpture as something that stages experience or activates the viewer?
I tend to think of sculpture less as a fixed object and more as a set of conditions. The process of making already involves a tension between chance and decision. Resin flows, fragments shift, gravity intervenes. At the same time, each cut, placement, and pause requires choice. The work emerges through this continuous negotiation. It is neither entirely controlled nor entirely accidental.
Because of this, staging does not begin after the object is finished. It is embedded in how the work organizes space. A sculpture can operate simultaneously as prop, scenography, actor, and script, but these roles are structural rather than narrative. The arrangement determines how the body moves around it, how close one must lean in, and how long one lingers.
Scale plays a central role. Smallness produces a specific kind of attention. To look at a miniature environment, the viewer often bends, approaches, and narrows their gaze. The body adjusts. That adjustment is part of the work. Containment and proximity generate a heightened awareness of distance and touch. Even when physical contact is not allowed, the desire to touch or manipulate becomes palpable.
I am interested in how sculpture can slow down perception. The encounter unfolds over time. Instead of presenting an image to be consumed at once, the work withholds full visibility. It requires circling, peering, recalibrating. In that sense, sculpture stages experience by choreographing attention. The viewer becomes aware of their own looking, of their own movement in relation to material presence.
Thinking about community, what forms of connection or care guide you, and how do you see yourself situated within those relationships?
Community shapes everything, even when most of the working time is spent in solitude. Theatre itself emerged from collective structures. One can think of how ancient Greek civic life shaped both drama and ritual. Cultural forms do not arise in isolation. They are sustained by shared symbols, shared tensions, shared misunderstandings.
Conversation is central to this. Within the community, dialogue produces language, and language produces both meaning and nonsense. That unstable space between articulation and breakdown is one of the sources that feeds my work. Even when I am alone in the studio, the materials I use and the references I carry are already socially formed.
As an artist, studio visits and critiques were formative experiences. The feedback from people was not only evaluative but relational. It created a field in which ideas could shift, expand, or dissolve. Care, in that sense, took the form of attention and rigorous questioning.
More recently, teaching introductory theatre courses has become another site of exchange. The energy and feedback from my students are deeply generative. Teaching clarifies thinking. It also exposes blind spots. I see myself situated within a network of ongoing reciprocity.
Do you have any advice you would offer to others?
I am not sure I have advice, but I have learned to pay attention to energy. When multitasking, the choreography of movement and the reduction of cognitive friction become crucial. How one moves between tasks matters. Small adjustments in workflow can prevent unnecessary exhaustion. I try to build systems around the things that genuinely excite me. The system does not need to be fast or ambitious. It needs to be sustainable. Even a slow rhythm can carry work forward, as long as it is not constantly interrupted.
text & photo courtesy of Suiyuan Jin
- Website: https://suiyuanjin.com/
- Instagram: @suiyuanjin
