C. Spencer Yeh

Biography

C. Spencer Yeh is recognized for his interdisciplinary activities and collaborations as an artist, composer and improviser, as well as his music project Burning Star Core. Much of Yeh's video work engages with avant-garde composition and performance, variously as studies in form and technique, or as documentation of other artists working within his musical, geographic or social spheres.

Other projects are humorously charged excursions into pop and trash cultural anthropology within "tape trading"-style distribution, such as applying highly polished, Hollywood-style treatment to bootleg video sources or canned "music factory" versions of pop songs. Pitched at the turn-of-the-millennium transition from "IRL" trades of prized physical objects to BitTorrent file transfers, this aspect of Yeh's work engages questions of value, authenticity, access, and social interactions within shifting paradigms for (unauthorized) circulation of images.

C. Spencer Yeh was born in 1975 in Taipei, Taiwan. In 2009, Yeh’s first solo exhibition, Standard Definition, was presented at the Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati. Yeh has toured and performed widely, and has recently presented work at the 2014 Liverpool Biennial; the Contemporary Art Museum, Houston; the Pérez Art Museum, Miami; the Kinomuzeum at the Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw; the Kunsthalle Stavanger, Norway; and in New York City at The Stone; The Kitchen; and ISSUE Project Room, among many other performances and presentations. He collaborated with Triple Canopy for the 2014 Whitney Biennial. In Fall 2014 Yeh was featured in a Modern Mondays at the Museum of Modern Art, NY. Recent recorded works include Ambient, with Robert Piotrowicz, 1975 (as C. Spencer Yeh), Transitions (as CS Yeh), and Wake Up Awesome, with Okkyung Lee and Lasse Marhaug. Yeh volunteers as a programmer and trailer editor for Spectacle Theater in Brooklyn, and co-organized Spectacle’s participation in NYC Makers: The MAD Biennial (2014), at the Museum of Arts and Design. He is a contributing editor to BOMB magazine. Yeh is a 2015 Artist-in-Residence at ISSUE Project Room, Brooklyn. Yeh lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.