John Yuyi

John Yuyi (b. 1991, Taiwan) is a visual artist living and working between Taipei and New York. Since 2014 she has used the temporary tattoo as her primary medium, printing social media interfaces, emoji, and images from mass culture onto transfer paper and applying them to skin, turning the human body into a canvas and a feed. Beginning with Bodypost (2014), made to mark reaching 2,000 Facebook followers, and continuing with Becoming Famous (2017), in which she wore transfer images of a celebrity's face and posted the self-portraits to Instagram, her work examines self-image, the construction of identity online, and the short life cycle of fame in the information age. Her photographs move between the roles of photographer, model, designer, and artist, and her exhibition MY(TEMPORARY)SELF (Make Room, Los Angeles, 2018) presented recent works that take her own body and persona as source material.

Yuyi received her degree in Fashion Design from Shih Chien University, Taipei, and worked as an intern for designer Jason Wu before turning to art. Solo exhibitions include MY(TEMPORARY)SELF, Make Room, Los Angeles (2018); her first solo exhibition in China at Gallery Vacancy, Shanghai (2018); and The Next Gen: John Yuyi, presented by The Art Vacancy at Site 57 Gallery, New York (2018). Her work has also been shown at the Museum of Sex, New York (2018), and in How to Win at Photography: Image-Making as Play at Fotomuseum Winterthur, Switzerland (2021). She was named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 Asia list in the arts category in 2018 and has completed projects with Gucci, Nike, Kenzo, Burberry, and Maison Margiela. Her work has been profiled by i-D, Dazed, NYLON, Office, the BBC, and The New York Times.