Cizzoe Yi Wang
b. 2000, China.
Based in London, UK.
Cizzoe Yi Wang is an interdisciplinary artist whose work spans installation, sculpture, performance and independent documentary filmmaking.
In 2021, she graduated with first-class honors in Film Practices from Newcastle University, where she was awarded an academic prize for excellent research. In 2022, she completed her MA in Ethnographic and Documentary Film with distinction at UCL. Her documentary shorts have been selected and awarded at numerous film festivals, including the Royal Television Society and Screen Power Film Festival. In 2024, Cizzoe earned her second master's degree in Contemporary Art Practice at the Royal College of Art, her work has been exhibited at Tate Modern London as part of Montez Press Radio x RCA CAP Broadcast and Screening.
Cizzoe’s background in social anthropology deeply informs her artistic practice, where she developed a link between documentary practice and participatory projects as means of engaging with others to understand our social experiences. Central to her current practice is the idea that human interaction operates like a game, a social performance governed by rules — both explicit and implicit. By writing performative game instructions and creating interactive installations, Cizzoe constructs microcosms of societal rules, offering participants a space to playfully navigate through the structured system and reinterpret it. Particularly focuses on creating structures for intimate interaction with strangers that could reveal unknown outcomes giving room for autonomous expression and for the group dynamics to reveal itself.
In her game instructions, power and control are equally held by all participants, creating a continuous dynamic equilibrium in which control flows and shifts between individuals within the group. She seeks to stimulate the tensions between competition and collaboration, constraint and freedom, order and spontaneity, intimacy and distance. In this setting, where control intertwines with the loss of control, and harmony coexists with conflict.
Cizzoe subtly embeds her concept of ‘to win is to withdraw’ within these instructions, where participants achieve victory by navigating their way to exit from the endless cycle of exerting control over each other.