Artist with multicultural background - Art and Design tutor with Yang

I taught Yang for three years on the BA (Hons) Fine Art degree course at Wimbledon College of Arts (University of the Arts London) between 2015 and 2018. Yang is highly ambitious, committed, and talented, in addition to being very intelligent and perceptive. She is also reliable and punctual. Yang is very positive and sociable; my colleagues and I considered her to be pivotal in promoting communication and peer learning within her year-group at the College.
Yang's personality is open and outgoing. She takes great interest in people and finds it easy to create purposeful dialogue and to offer effective support. I have no hesitation in recommending Yang Xu highly for professional tutoring in arts and arts related subjects, where I believe her enthusiasm and skills should be constructive and well placed.

I have known Yang Xu since 2016 in my captivity as Course Leader fir BA Fine Art, Painting at Wimbledon College of Arts - part of University of the Arts London. Yang graduated from the course in 2018 with a First Class honours.
Leader and am currently her academic tutor. She subsequently went on to study for an MA in Painting at the Royal College of Art.
Yang was an extremely ambitious student who, from her early weeks on the BA,
impressed me with her material innovations and willingness to take risks. She has consistently maintained a self-reflexive attitude to her practice and an unusual ability
to see ideas through to polished realisation.
Yang's practice hovers between painting and performance, increasingly involving her lived experience 'as the artwork'. Recent works are choreographed to include single photographic images translated into paintings then further larger scale performances and re-workings in other media. Yang is clear about her total inclusion - as subject,
performer, maker, director. Although the work has a coolness to it, it functions
outside fashion and takes on a complex set of references to histories of portraiture
and the documentation/performance of identities and - albeit extraordinary - daily
life.
As the work would imply, Yang is able to handle multiple simultaneous activities and is often involved in a myriad of activities, exhibitions and curatorial projects. She has
an unerringly confident nature and her contribution to peer discussion is often
original and useful to others. I've found her a huge pleasure to teach and have much enjoyed being witness to the intensity of the development of her work.
It is rare to come across a young artist as forthright and openly ambitious as Yang.
She remains the only student I've ever taught to have come to a tutorial with
marshmallows for eyebrows. She's an exception and I strongly support this
application in the knowledge she'd make much of the opportunity to support others and share her knowledge and ideas.
Yang is also a fluent Madarin speaker so, although I’ve selected Art as the subject she can teach, she could also teach Mandarin.
Yours sincerely,
Dr Zoë Mendelson, Pathway Leader,