Yilina Yang

Announcing the 2025 Washington Foundation Bursary Awardee – Yilina Yang

We are delighted to announce that this year’s Royal College of Art Ceramics and Glass Bursary has been awarded to Yilina Yang, an artist whose practice navigates the fragile tensions between permanence and impermanence with exquisite sensitivity.

Artist Statement

Yilina is an observer of humanity’s fragile reflections in the face of impermanence. Her ceramic practice explores this duality, with each act of creation serving as a meditation on our collective yearning to outlast time. Clay, a material that endures for millennia, becomes a vessel for this paradox: it feeds our hunger for eternity even as it testifies to inevitable decay.

She completed her MA in Ceramics and Glass at the Royal College of Art, following a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design. Drawing from Vanitas traditions, historical hunting scenes, and contemporary fragments—such as nostalgic fashion trends and social media archives—her work reveals the quiet poetry in how we grapple with transience.

Her pieces initially captivate with shimmering metallic glazes, synthetic gems, and illusionistic finishes, only to reveal their underlying fragility. Animalistic remnants—skin, scales, feathers, and skeletal hollows— their lifelike textures hinting at the void they are destined to become. These surfaces hover between seduction and collapse, evoking both desire and unease.

Yilina’s forms exist in paradoxical spaces: between life and artifice, archaeological trace and futuristic excess. By shaping absence into structure and beauty into a subtle warning, she gives form to the quiet fear of what lingers—and what fades.