Lily Yeh - ‘How Art Transforms Brokenness into Beauty’
Lily Yeh is a successful artist and professor, whose life purpose is to weave beauty into areas where all such hopes have been lost; she achieves this through the creation of beautiful mosaics and collages, transforming areas of derelict and desertion, into spaces representative of the spirit of its inhabitants.
Yeh was born into a prominent family in Taiwan in 1941, came to the U.S. to attend the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Fine Arts, and eventually became an art professor at the Philadelphia School of Fine Arts.
Throughout her career, she has metamorphosed many towns and spaces, her first project alongside the dancer Arthur Hall. He asked for her help in reviving a particularly grim stretch of neighbourhood outside one of his studios in North Philidelphia. As soon as she began, her work drew the attention of children desperate to help. Quickly, she had captivated the interest of the whole neighbourhood and had hundreds of inhabitants involved in cleaning the area, painting murals and creating an ‘art park’. From this, she founded The Village of Arts and Humanities, which annually served over 10,000 low-income, primarily African American youth and families, covering several neighbourhoods in North Philadelphia.
Arguably her most famous work was that of the genocide memorial of Twibuke: her Rwanda Healing Project,created ten years after the 1994 genocide that killed one million people over 100 days. The structure contained a mass grave, and a survivors village called ‘Rugerero’. Following her work, a survivor of the genocide told her, ‘When we see beauty, we see hope’, and this seems to summarise the purpose of all Yeh’s creations.
The appreciation and desire for beauty does not make us superficial or shallow. It is a human need. Yeh states in her TED talk that it is ‘beauty our souls yearn for’. This concept of beauty is not limited only to the final product of her art, but also in the act of creation: the unity and community she brings to areas of hopelessness. The ability to express not only joy and love, but pain and sorrow is incredibly valuable, and her work gives people this power. By handing members of communities across the globe the ability to transform their own spaces, she gifted them a sense of pride in the beauty of their own community, and the artwork created is the physical expression of this beauty.
Within her TED talk, Yeh also discusses the Chinese philosophy of ‘dustless world’ which she describes to be ‘a place of pristine beauty and the mental pollution of self-centredness and greed’ which can only be reached through the act of creation and self-expression. By making art, in whatever form possible, there is an ability to detach from one’s thoughts and enter a state of ambivalence towards our own selves, and an investment towards our communities.
TED talk link: https://youtu.be/oD50pUZFEbo?si=MqByO7zSaCSkgnbL
Photo link:
https://www.freepik.com/free-ai-image/illustration-digital-art-style-with-pottery_316943471.htm#fromView=search&page=1&position=3&uuid=1113b215-ced4-460b-ab3b-9bb3e57d33f2&query=Art