Yolanda Ren (b. 2002) is a Chinese multidisciplinary artist currently based in Toronto. She completed her HBA in 2025 at the University of Toronto, Canada, specializing in Philosophy with a minor in Visual Studies. Her artistic practice mainly employs interactive installations and performance art to depict systemic alienation under neoliberal capitalism, and consequently exploring new possibilities for human connection and collective experience. She integrates objects, projections, images, video, text, performances, and interactive elements into her works. Her core objective is to transform philosophical theories through subjective interpretation and personal artistic expression, thereby bridging continental and analytic traditions and contemporary art.
Central to her methodology is embedding interactivity as a conceptual necessity. By constructing works as "social experiments," Ren transfers her artistic authority to viewers. The artwork thus evolves into a dynamic entity whose visual outcomes depend on participants’ actions—a direct critique of the passive zombification of audiences in traditional modern art and even interactive works that reduce viewers to zombie-like triggers of predetermined responses.
Equally pivotal is her collective critique of systematic alienation. Her work exposes capitalism’s transformation of human relations into commodified exchanges, causing individuals to lose recognition of their authentic selves. Through highly interactive "social experiments," participants negotiate new modes of relations and interactions, challenge hierarchies and co-construct ephemeral "temporal micro-utopias." These spaces simultaneously deconstruct how societal power structures erode human bonds, and propose decentralized interaction as an alternative, emphasizing the transcendence of collective experience beyond capitalist frameworks.