Feature by Casey Epstein-Gross
Photos by Anushka Khetawat
Yimo Chong is an artist, a talented one, but above all else, he’s an activist—and nothing makes that more evident than his paintings. Despite currently working on a series of oil paintings entitled “Progress” (many of which can be seen in this article) depicting the hypocrisy bolstering that titular neoliberal narrative that’s taken both his original home of China and his current home of America by storm, Yimo’s true focus is aimed, laser-sharp, at labor advocacy writ large. A double Politics and Economics major whose academic interests are primarily focused on Latin America (he’s fluent in Spanish and even interned in Chile in 2021), Yimo’s retelling of his life is filled with anecdotes of class consciousness reckonings deserving of memoir: his anarchist awakening was in elementary school when his role as Safety Patrol (no running in the hallways, classmates!) made him question fundamental institutions of power, and he burst into tears upon turning the page of a textbook in high school and learning that Salvador Allende died. But his relationship to art is no less insightful and nuanced than his political awareness; how could it be, when the former has become, for him, almost a manifestation of the latter? For Yimo, painting is both a space separate from the rest of the world that allows him to “regain the sense of a normal life” and an active process that forces the painter to interrogate societal standards of “normalcy,” bringing about an unlearning, a denormalization, of norms themselves.
When did you first begin to take an interest in art?
It was before primary school, I think. Instead of sending me to a really intense cram school, which is the norm in China, I was very lucky and my parents sent me to this art place, and the teacher was very nice. The moment I realized I liked art was maybe just when the teacher at one point said, like, “Oh, did you know crayons and watercolor don't mix?” And for some reason, little kid me was just, like, “Oh, my God!” My mind was blown. After that, I pretty much just stayed at that art school for a very long time—all the way until I left for the United States in high school.
Is oil painting is still your medium of choice? Did you ever experiment significantly with other art forms, or primarily sketching and oil painting?
There was another period of time during primary school, and middle school, where I also learned Chinese art—this kind of Chinese watercolor thing. It was a totally different style. It didn’t matter whether things looked realistic; you were just supposed to get the vibe. t least from our home, Impressionists learned from Japanese art, and that’s why they started doing that different style in the first place. There was something, like, Daoist about it. I think there’s this sense in a lot of Chinese art that to have something, like, full is actually pretty gaudy, which is why blank space is prioritized so much. I think it’s about being content with some imperfections and actually making them part of the painting. The result is pretty calming.
Obviously, you mostly focus on oil painting these days but are there any remnants of this style, this mindset, that linger in your art or your artistic process even now?
The idea of keeping the important things in the forefront, of making those more detailed, and backgrounding the rest so that it is not overwhelming is still pretty relevant to my art, but more than that, my mindset AND my heart. This sentiment, and art in general, basically reminds me that I should block some time off for, essentially, empty space so that the actual important things can get the room they need. It’s mostly a mentality thing.
What was it about the art school that you went to, about art, that you felt so drawn to?
It definitely wasn’t that I was good at it. I remember there was a time when I tried to be creative, and I wanted to draw a little bird resting on a cloud, and it just looked like it died there. I tried so hard to make it better, but I literally could not figure out how to make it not look dead. It was just a really fun experience. You could draw all of these things and use colors however you want—it felt very freeing. That lack of pressure and being able to just do something out of love is probably why art is the one thing that I’ve continued to do throughout all this time, even when I left for the United States, and even when I came back.
But then, though, the art school teacher I really liked turned out to be super transphobic. I look very passing right now, so people often get confused or surprised when they hear that I’m trans—but back then, I was not. At that point, I was 14 and I had just come out and it was a time when I needed a lot of support. And, well, she was not very supportive. By now, I had already gone to the United States—it was ninth grade—and there was a girl there who was also transgender, the first trans person I had ever met in my life. She—her name was Emelia Worth—became a really good friend of mine. She was so outgoing; she was the little sun of the entire campus. She invited me to her concert and I remember we had this long talk, and she was just very supportive, and nice, and energetic—she was just, like, everything, you know? And then she had depression. Nobody knew about it. And then she committed suicide. That was one of the first things that, eventually, made me realize how terrible the United States was.
Right, because you were brand new there, so you really had no sense of what it was actually like yet.
There’s this fantasy that, in a lot of places but in my case in China, people have about America, especially middle-class liberals. It’s insane to think about now. We looked at the United States and thought it fixed everything bad and authoritarian and unfair in China, in everywhere. When I first came to the United States, I was 14 and I guess I was not supposed to be this stupid, but I genuinely thought that there were no poor people in the United States. There’s just so much propaganda from the United States but I honestly don’t think it’s as effective as our own propaganda, distributed by diaspora, by people who are just guessing what’s happening that these myths begin to feel like facts. To then go to the United States and experience that suicide so soon after, and to see the school be so unresponsive to it was just very unreal.
I was really sad, so I came back home for a few weeks that winter, and thought I’d go back to the art studio and do a sketch of Emelia. I wanted to make a postcard, something people could remember her by. That was the first time I ever drew a detailed person, body, face, eyes, and ears altogether. Naturally, I wanted my teacher to take a look at it and see if it was okay. And then she just started doing transphobic stuff. Eventually, she said, “I want to take you to gǔzhēng performances.” The gǔzhēng is a traditional Chinese string instrument, right? There’s this weird belief that if someone is exposed to more traditional Chinese culture, they would just stop becoming transgender. It’s weird! People have weird understandings of what being transgender is.
Anyways,I switched to a different tutor after that. The thing is, though, I live out of spite. So after that, I was honestly just, like, “I have to finish this and I have to do it well.” It took me a long time but I did eventually make the postcards and send them out to the school—I still have one or two of them. That was another major leap forward in my career; I became much more confident with drawing humans.
What did it feel like when you finished the drawing, considering how charged the entire situation was?
It was just…nice. I picked a picture of Emelia from when she was playing the guitar and she was just in her moment, you know? The happiest. You know how in that Soul movie from Disney when people were in their moment, their soul started floating? This was that moment.
Was this drawing of Emelia your first endeavor into socially conscious art?
Yes. Although, honestly, I didn’t do much more of it until down the line—I did a series of oil paintings on climate change and animal abuse in AP Art, but that was mostly just because AP Art wanted me to pick a theme, so I picked one. It’s not like I did a lot of research into climate
change or anything.
When did your current series — “Progress” — begin? What was the impetus for it? It’s a lot more overtly political than your previous work, so what shifted there for you?
The first painting of the series—not that it was a series yet—started back in 2021, when I quarantining at home during COVID. At this point, I was not very aware of labor problems or capitalism or any of that, at least in China; I had left when I was 14 and I never paid attention to the workers’ situation, which is weird to think about, because I’m Chinese. It was right after the Chinese New Year, and it was COVID, and outside I saw this food delivery worker working. And to work in Beijing, right after the Chinese New Year, and during COVID too, I thought it was insane. The government didn’t give him or any other migrant workers any kind of relief or assistance that would allow people to stay home, but there was nothing, so they just started working, working whatever they could—so that was the first painting with this guy. And I guess it was just this moment of understanding, of realizing that “This is not normal.”
What was it about that moment in particular that struck you—not just politically, but artistically? What about witnessing this made you think “This should be a painting?”
I think it was five o’clock in the morning, and there were festive lanterns still hung up from the Chinese New Year, and this guy was already working. That juxtaposition struck me the most. And right at that moment, I just knew that I should paint it.
Is there something politically salient about painting, or the act of painting? What is it about this specific medium that felt so right to capture these moments for you?
There's something unique in painting, for me, in how much time it forces you to spend on the same thought. You sit on the idea for like two weeks, and then two or three weeks you have to spend just painting. When you sit on something like this for such a long time, you keep reflecting. So when you want to add some details, you think, “Does this fit the situation? What exactly do I want to convey?” It also helps you to denormalize the situation. I never thought that I was “fighting for justice” with these paintings or anything. It just helped begin and illustrate the conversation on labor for me.
I wanted to make sure that painting something that I actually have to unlearn, that the subject is something that I'm reflecting on instead of just following whatever people are talking about at that moment.
So it’s crucial for you, for this series, to physically witness these moments in time?
Yeah. Take the painting with the women quarantined in the store in Beijing. I think what happened with them was that there was one guy who was on that same street of stores, and he went to a different store, not even their store, but then that guy tested positive, so then everybody in the whole neighborhood went on lockdown. Workers were at risk because they had to go to work, and if they went to work, not only would they have a higher potential of being exposed to COVID, but even if they didn’t, they’d get locked down in their workplace, forced to sleep on hard floors. Other residents, like white-collar workers, weren't locked down in their workplaces, they could still go home. It was such a weird and unfair policy. It wasn’t until I quite literally walked by the interaction shown in the painting that it fully hit me; it was that moment, that feeling of “this is just not fair for them.” These aren’t random people on the news, but real people living real lives forced to exist in unreal conditions, and we can only start to reckon with that when we begin to unpack the “normal” things we otherwise don’t even think to question.
Right now, the news doesn't really report on this kind of stuff. Instead of finding something that everybody's talking about, I'm trying to find instances where this kind of resistance can start in everyday life. Like, this is also not normal. It's not just "oh, the workers are owed wages, and they're protesting." Of course that's not normal, it's not right that they're owed wages they aren't receiving, but even when they're not protesting or actively being owed wages, this is all still not normal. The status quo is still not good!
Exactly—people are always like “if only we could go back…” and, like, to when?! To an alternate history or something?
Yeah! It’s crazy. People have this nostalgia for no reason, making them forget so much of reality. That’s why I tried to make this whole series about the things I saw. There needs to be this process where you see a moment, sit on it, and then realize "Wait, this is not normal.” For example, inthe painting of the woman with the trash can, it's normal for her to walk by those gypsum figures, in that coat, in the richest neighborhood in Shenzhen. This is a “normal” situation for—but you have to recognize "No, this is not normal." You have to unlearn that.
Together, these paintings form your “Progress” series—what does “progress” mean to you, both in the context of the series and in general?
After that first painting, I knew I wanted to start a series just called “Progress” about the liberalization of the Chinese economy, about combating the liberal narrative I grew up with. There’s this illusion of upward mobility when it comes to migrant workers in China, but there aren’t any—they become white-collar workers, capitalists, or shop owners. They don’t do any of that. They just have to continue working for the worst wages in the worst jobs. And this was particularly bad during COVID. But right now, I'm sort of running into a bottleneck of sorts because I haven't been in China for a long time, so it’s not like the last two years during COVID when I saw a lot of people, saw a lot of this kind of stuff.
What’s your focus right now, then?
Right now, I am working for a lot of labor advocacy stuff—I mean, you just have to do something, you know? You see all these workers, you want to do something. Right now, I've been doing a lot of research, and I'm thinking for the future that I will use some of this research and turn them into paintings, even though I haven't seen them in real life? But I'm still deciding because it definitely would break the previous rule about wanting to see something firsthand. Right now, these five paintings have all been following the same rule. Hopefully, I will try to continue focusing on Chinese labor, and I might start to include the research pieces, but I'm still hoping to see something firsthand and then paint it.