Emily B. Yang (b. 1991) is a Brooklyn-based ceramic and block print artist. She hand-carves blocks to print on paper and porcelain forms to explore the tension between cultural and social expectations, and self-determination. Emily has exhibited at the Royal Academy of Art in London, the Yale School of Architecture, and the Harvard Graduate School of Design Kirkland Gallery. She has completed artist residencies at the Penland School of Craft (twice!), Anderson Ranch Arts Center, and Archie Bray Foundation. She is a graduate of Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design and is a 2025–26 Fulbright Scholar researching block printing and ceramics at Banaras Hindu University in India.
Emily B. Yang merges block printing and ceramics to explore the intersections of tradition, identity, and personal narrative. She hand-carves blocks and prints them onto handbuilt or slip-cast porcelain forms, layering imagery drawn from traditional Chinese porcelain motifs of lineage, care, and longevity with invented symbols and diagrams that reflect her lived experiences and anxieties as she steps into new identities as “artist,” “wife,” and eventually “mother.”
Her process is both physically demanding and conceptually layered. Porcelain—historically a cultural marker of refinement—becomes, in her work, a metaphor for conformity and the impossible standards imposed by self, culture, and society. Printing on its fragile, handbuilt surface is nearly impossible; each impression risks fissures that echo the struggle of meeting those expectations while simultaneously carving out space for her own story.