Informed by her long-term interest in the complex tensions between music, dance, text, and video, Yao Qingmei’s practice collapses the boundary between performance and its site. Her practice is rooted in a critical reflection into the formulation of political and social questions, exploring how symbolic gestures gain or lose power through forms of appropriation and displacement. Humor plays an important role in her work, and she uses the poetics of comedy to expose the absurdity of a particular issue. Offering different methods of resistance, her video works, theatrical performances and interventions incorporate burlesque traditions of satire and parody. They often incorporate framing devices influenced by theatre sets and costume, pedagogical lectures, the dialectic between image and text, and choreography inspired by modern dance.