Songer Yang Featured in Our Culture for Work on Memory and Material
Songer Yang.
Our Culture magazine recently profiled Songer Yang (MFA 2D Design 2025). Writer Abbie Wilson calls Yang’s practice “a radical act of meditative slowness” in an age built for speed.
Yang, born in Shaoxing, China, is based in Jersey City and works across painting, fiber, and object-making. She treats ordinary domestic objects, a spoon, a hairbrush, a swatch of fabric, as carriers of family memory. The article centers on Spoon, Yang’s two-part project built around a childhood utensil she lost, one she once used to eat her grandmother’s steamed egg. In Part 1 (2024), Yang worked alongside her grandfather, hammering salvaged copper from broken rice cookers into a new spoon. In Part 2 (2025), she spent a month making one spoon a day, entirely from memory. As the spoons multiplied, her memory of the original blurred.
Songer Yang, Spoons project.
“As the number of spoons grew, I started to forget what the original one even looked like,” Yang says. “Were the spoons I made still my spoon?”
Her Spoon project has also shown internationally, featured on Arte Laguna World’s platform for sculpture and installation.
Yang’s soft sculptures push the same questions further. In Hair (2024) and Womb (2024), yarn, foam, and beads become what Wilson calls “corporeal archives of female ancestry.” Pray (2025) uses weathered fabric and patinated iron to sit with grief and the quiet labor of care.
Learn more:
Holding Space: Material Culture, Slowness, And Memory In The Work of Songer Yang – Our Culture
