Yao’s current research examines how cultural forms acquire authority, value, and evidentiary force as they move across media, institutions, and historical conditions. Working across performance and media studies, visual culture, religious studies, Asian studies, and the history of knowledge, she is interested in the processes by which practices and bodies become available for judgment: who describes them, which media make them legible, what forms of value attach to them, and how those valuations return to shape the people and practices being described.

​

Her research at the Folger Shakespeare Library investigates one early history of this problem through European encounters with China. As a 2026–27 Folger Institute Artistic Research Fellow, Yao studies seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century print culture in which geographically distant practices became objects of theological, moral, political, and epistemological judgment. Her archival work brings together travel writing, missionary controversy, diplomatic and commercial publications, and illustrated works including Samuel Purchas’s writings, the 1710 Memoires for Rome concerning the Chinese Rites Controversy, and Athanasius Kircher’s China Illustrata. Rather than treating these sources primarily as representations of an already existing “East,” she asks how print itself made judgment at a distance possible. Translation, testimony, illustration, classification, and typology allowed bodies and practices that most European readers would never encounter directly to become comparable, interpretable, and available for judgment.

​

This research has developed into a larger project on the political economy of cultural valuation. Yao is particularly interested in what happens when a practice passes from one regime of value into another: from ritual efficacy to ethnographic evidence, from religious form to cultural heritage, from material practice to museum collection, or from lived transmission to an image capable of circulating through markets and institutions. Her concern lies with the mediating forms that make these conversions possible and with the authority accumulated in the process. A printed image, archival description, heritage designation, exhibition display, or market category does more than preserve information. Each establishes particular conditions under which a cultural form can be seen, compared, valued, and circulated.

​

A second strand of this research turns to Tibetan Buddhist material and ritual forms whose temporal lives complicate conventional assumptions about preservation. Thangka, torma, and sand mandala offer sharply different relations among material persistence, ritual efficacy, transmission, and disappearance. A thangka may endure as an image and move through devotional, heritage, museum, and market contexts. A torma may be offered, consumed, dismantled, dispersed, or allowed to decay. A sand mandala reaches completion through its destruction and dispersal. These cases lead Yao to ask what preservation can mean when remaining materially intact is not necessarily the measure of a form’s continuity. The question also bears directly on museums and heritage institutions, whose methods of care have historically privileged forms capable of surviving as stable and collectible things.

​

Her earlier research on Chinese Nuo ritual remains an important foundation for this work. Studying ritual sequence, spectatorship, documentation, and transmission led Yao to confront a methodological problem that continues to shape her research: resemblance across sources does not guarantee equivalence of authority. A court office described in an early text, a village altar rite, a state heritage presentation, an ethnographic record, and a contemporary performance may preserve related gestures or names while belonging to different social relations and systems of authorization. Her work therefore asks what a source can legitimately establish, what disappears when practices move between contexts, and how researchers might resist allowing accessibility or circulation to stand in for cultural authority.

​

Across these projects, Yao approaches performance as one part of a wider history of mediation. Bodies remain crucial because value and authority eventually return to bodies: shaping who may perform, who may interpret, whose knowledge becomes credible, which practices become representative, and which forms are preserved, exhibited, reproduced, or allowed to disappear. Her current research follows these movements across several centuries without assuming that they constitute a single continuous mechanism. Instead, early modern print, ritual practice, heritage administration, museums, and contemporary cultural markets provide distinct sites for examining how cultural forms become commensurable, how judgments acquire durability, and what happens when those judgments begin to reorganize the worlds they claim merely to describe.