Sandie (Chun-shan) Yi

Sandie (Chunshan) Yi (she/her) is a Chicago-based visual and textile artist, disability culture maker, and educator. Her work explores the disabled bodymind as a site of knowledge, memory, and an agent of cultural transformation. Born in Taiwan with a hereditary physical disability, Yi’s artistic practice began with a desire to reconnect with a body that had been described by others as defective, incomplete, or imperfect. Working across wearable art, textiles, sculpture, biomaterials, and social practice, she creates body adornments, small sculptures, and participatory encounters that investigate visibility/invisibility, protection, intimacy, access, and care. Her work examines the emotional and physical labor demanded of disabled bodies within ableist systems.  

Central to Yi’s practice is Crip Couture, an ongoing conceptual and material framework that reimagines fashion, adornment, prosthetics, and assistive design through disability aesthetics, politics, and lived experience. Her processes often emerge from memories of staring and other social encounters with her body. Mold-making of her hands and feet becomes a form of intimate witnessing; sewing evokes stitches, wounds, and scars; and collected biomaterials such as dead skin and calluses document the often-invisible physical labor of disabled bodies. Through humor, playfulness, material experimentation, and intimate storytelling, she constructs alternative ways of understanding disabled bodies and disability ways of being, making, and relating.  

 A transformative encounter with Chicago’s disability arts and culture community in 2006 shifted Yi’s practice from primarily autobiographical expression toward collective disability narratives and disability culture. Since then, her work as an artist, activist, educator, and arts administrator has focused on challenging ableism within cultural institutions, supporting fellow disabled artists, and creating spaces in which disabled people can participate as cultural producers on their own terms. Yi currently teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC). She is the co-director of Bodies of Work: Network of Disability Art and Culture and Coordinator of Arts and Culture Project at Access Living. She holds a Ph.D. in Disability Studies from the University of Illinois Chicago (UIC), an MFA from the University of California, Berkeley, and an MA in Art Therapy from SAIC. Her interdisciplinary research brings together disability studies, social practice art, and disability culture–informed art therapy, positioning creative practice as a form of inquiry, cultural intervention, and living archive.  

Yi’s work has been exhibited at SOMArts Cultural Center, the Nancy M. Bruce Center for Design and Material Culture at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, Gallery 400 at UIC, the Museum of Disability History, Denver Art Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Arts San Diego, Chicago Cultural Center, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Frederik Meijer Gardens & Sculpture Park, and Contemporary Craft in Pittsburgh. She is a recipient of the Disability Futures Fellowship, supported by the Ford Foundation and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the 3Arts Make a Wave Award. In addition to Yi’s art practice, she hangs out with her beloved doggie daughter, Abái, whose name means “ugly duckling” in Taiwanese.