KAIXI Yang
Kaixi (kai-Shee) is a polymathic artist and climate design activist from Auckland, New Zealand, based in New York City. Her practice, grounded in play, performance and embodiment, speculates rituals, artefacts and technologies that heal and augment our relationships with ourselves and nature.
Graduating from the Product Design program at Stanford University, Kaixi worked on sustainable fashion technology, wearable devices for air pollution, open source medical device hardware, and waste-stream investigation in Delhi before co-founding ENTITY, a creative engineering consultancy for the health of people & planet, implementing design for industries as diverse as nuclear fusion, responsible mining, battery materials, agent-based AI, robotics, ecovillage design, biomaterials and climate grief. She is also a founder of a community event series, Talking Animals, which has gathered community around degrowth, fossil fuel abolition, & urban greening, holding space for direct action activists and climate innovators.
Working in a plethora of mediums, Kaixi has shown works internationally, with Works in Progress, Persona NYC, BronxArtSpace, San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art, the Anderson Collection at Stanford, the Sludge Hub (abandoned mineland in West Virginia), and the Auckland Art Festival, culminating in her first solo exhibition at ThirdSpace NYC in 2024. She has completed residencies & traineeships at Apple Inc, AR House LA, Laguna MX, NEW INC, Prime Produce, GROW Externships, & the University of Auckland’s Microbiology Department, producing novel concepts in brain-computer interface, land art, bioluminescent bacteria, biomaterials, & fragrance.
Kaixi’s work has been published in Vogue Business, Lovers Magazine, Compose Yourself Magazine, & Sinetheta Magazine. She has spoken on her fashion designs at the UN, and was the recipient of a 10K grant from the World Economic Forum & the Climate Reality Project, culminating in a workshop on Doughnut Economics and Indigenous Engagement for Auckland Council’s youth climate action group, which was adapted into a guest lecture for Parsons School of Design. She has also facilitated an online course, Art as Climate Intervention, for the Interact Fellowship, a design thinking workshop for the rural city of Susaki, Japan, and moderated a panel on neurotech ethics for the Games for Change conference.