Can Yang
Profession
Associate Lecturer, Chelsea College of Arts
College
Chelsea College of Arts
Person Type
Staff
Biography
Can Yang is a designer, art director and academic whose research explores the intersections of visual communication, language and cultural identity. Her research examines how visual systems construct, circulate and destabilise meaning within post-digital and translingual conditions, with particular attention to the cultural and political dynamics of image production and interpretation.
Her work positions design as a critical and reflexive mode of inquiry in which image-making, publishing and pedagogy operate as interconnected research methodologies. A central concern is the shift from linear, author-centred models of communication towards more relational and distributed forms of knowledge production.
Her research framework, Neobridge, proposes a non-linear model of visual communication structured through networked and multi-scalar relations rather than fixed transmission. It considers how visual language can challenge dominant frameworks of meaning-making by opening space for relational and dynamic forms of interpretation. In doing so, it foregrounds ambiguity, multiplicity and interpretive openness as generative conditions for practice, while engaging with underrepresented knowledge systems and alternative modes of communication that respond to shifting cultural, linguistic and geopolitical contexts.
Alongside her academic and research practice, Can Yang works across art direction, editorial design and exhibition-related projects. She is Art Director of te magazine, an annual bilingual publication on contemporary art and cultural anthropology, and has collaborated with cultural and commercial clients including Nike, Selfridges, Tai Kwun Contemporary Art Museum, De Singel, Parasite Art Space, It’s Nice That, Draw Down Books, among others.
She teaches on postgraduate Visual Communication programmes at the Royal College of Art and University of the Arts London. She holds an MA (CHS Distinction) in Visual Communication from the Royal College of Art, a BFA (Honors) in Graphic Design from the Rhode Island School of Design, and an Associate Fellowship of the Higher Education Academy (AFHEA).