A letter

Yuxin (Valkyrie) Yao

October 8, 2025

Dear Unnamed human being,

When I read your letter, I felt something rare. The words did not feel transactional but human. They spoke to a way of working that values difference as knowledge and creativity as care. They carried the quiet invitation of a dialogue that might become a life. I am writing not to perform competence but to share the inner weather that keeps me creating and searching.

I grew up in Qinghai on the edge of Tibet, surrounded by mountains that seemed to breathe and hold time differently. My family was traditional and patriarchal. Women were expected to be quiet and even to sit in a certain way, and art was considered ornamental or indulgent. I learned early that silence can become its own language. I began to translate constraint into expression, turning what was forbidden into form. That resistance taught me how to stay true to curiosity and tenderness even when expectation asked for compliance. I found my refuge in movement. I watched the wind ripple through prayer flags and felt that rhythm enter my body. Tibetan Buddhist and Daoist thought shaped me before I ever studied them. From those landscapes I learned stillness, impermanence, and the humility of being small in a vast and living world. That environment taught compassion not only for people but for stones, trees, and animals. It planted a longing to step beyond what I knew, to walk through other lands and meet other ways of being human.

My given name is Yuxin. Yu came from the rain that fell the day I was born, and Xin carries the image of new growth after rain. I chose Valkyrie as an artistic name when I understood that I could begin again without abandoning who I have been. I treat myself as a work in progress, not a disappearance. Valkyrie reminds me to break the bindings I inherited, to lift myself from rubble, and to reach for others who are still climbing out. I am not replacing Yuxin, I am widening her, so that tenderness and courage can live in the same body.

A few years ago I tore my ACL during rehearsal. I was alone in a foreign country, facing surgery and recovery without family nearby. That period became my first real collaboration with solitude. I learned to build systems of care from scratch, to heal through observation and patience. I realized that strength does not come from endurance but from listening to pain until it teaches you something. It taught me that care is a form of strategy and that healing can be a radical creative act. It changed how I create and how I lead myself. I no longer chase control. I work from attunement.

Coming from a context where difference and dissent were often curtailed, I have made inclusion a daily practice. I have felt the pressure of the male gaze, the sting of public humiliation, and years of body shaming in the performing arts. I have watched a room shift when my ethnicity or age is noticed and when someone decides I am too young or just an artist. I have also seen how censorship narrows imagination and how fear quiets tenderness. These experiences shaped a way of working that redistributes visibility and authorship, invites many languages of the body into inquiry, and treats equity as a method, not a slogan. I try to build spaces where difference is not ornamental but epistemic, where knowledge emerges from many bodies thinking together.

My mentors are two, a person and an animal. I hold all beings equal, so this pairing carries no hierarchy in my cosmology. The human is Xiao Shenming, who met me when my body was broken and my spirit hollowed by loss and doubt. One day he told me, “One becomes two, two becomes three, and three is you.” He turned the old teaching so I could see that the ten thousand things already live within the self, and that the self can hold the many without fear. He asked me to notice where my thinking had been quietly shaped by habits I did not choose, and to return to the silence where ancestral wisdom waits. I moved from endless devouring of knowledge to the slower practice of awakening, from accumulation to awareness, from learning to realization. The second mentor is a dog. Without words she taught me the wisdom of stillness and the courage to be slow in a world that hurries. She reminded me that reflection is not idleness but resistance to speed. With her I learned to sense the single blade of grass on a snow ridge, to feel its quiet perseverance, to notice how sunlight rests on stone, how all beings lean toward warmth. She taught me to loosen my human centered gaze, to feel not as an observer of the world but as part of the same field of being.

What I love most in art is the instant when gesture begins to think. The moment when silence or breath carries an idea before language arrives. Art for me is not representation but reasoning in another tongue. It is how I study the world when words fail. My work moves between Chinese classical dance, installation, and film, and also the unseen scaffolds that let work live in the world, the careful planning and the rituals of documentation that keep meaning intact. Through this hybridity I explore the ethics of attention and the politics of perception. I am interested in what remains when structure collapses and in how action can become evidence of thought.

When I have time to myself, I write so a thought does not fall into the void, and I walk so questions can settle and clear. I keep the small rituals that steadied my childhood. I write, I walk, I photograph shadows, I read philosophy, and I keep asking the same quiet questions. How can form stay porous enough to reveal the spirits that made it. How can presentation resist consumption. How can we reclaim slowness, letting time refine meaning before haste makes beauty disposable and reduces it to exchange. Living between two languages taught me to treat translation as a way of making. Not word for word, but intention into structure, breath into sequence. I try to turn the breath of an idea into steps that can be lived.

In ten years I hope to look back and see a body of work and a way of thinking that stand on their own and speak for me when I am gone. Artistically I want to refine a visual and kinetic language that unites philosophy and form. Scholarly I want to contribute to a pluriversal ecology where ancestral ways of knowing are not footnotes but working methods. Personally I hope to keep traveling, learning from other cultures and landscapes, letting my art become a conversation across borders. When I look back on my life, I want to see not accumulation but connection, a slow and deliberate weaving of meaning.

I often feel disillusioned by how art can be reduced to spectacle or investment, how speed erodes the quiet that allows reflection and the capacity to be moved. Yet I still believe in the unrecorded hours, the long nights, the fragile spark when an idea first breathes, the kind of devotion that cannot be monetized. I believe in attention and tenderness. I believe in listening as a first practice. I believe in bridges between action and reflection. And I believe that a life in art can be both rigorous and humane, faithful to the world and to the worlds that do not yet exist.

I imagine, ideally, that I could be clean, porous, and weighty. I hope that even on barren ground there will still be a stubborn rose, untamed. When I was young, the art in my heart had a soul, something that, after history has had time to settle, we could stand before again and still feel warmth, confusion, and the stirring of emotion. I find myself increasingly averse to speed; perhaps that is my limitation. What I long for, admire, and respect is slowness: things honed inch by inch by time, including ourselves and the works we make. Perhaps I’m out of place, wrong from beginning to end. Why do I pursue gravitas? Why do I try to avoid the superficial? Why have shallow works and shallow people become my opposite? I wish someone would argue with me about this.

Long ago, people already urged me to write my autobiography, but back then I thought: “Me? Why me? Who am I?” I seem to have asked myself that across different times and spaces. But now I write for myself.