Kyle Yip

Kyle Yip (b. 1988, Scarborough, Canada) is a Toronto-based, JUNO Award–nominated artist, conceptualist, electronic music producer, sound designer, and audio engineer of mixed racial descent whose practice operates coterminously across visual art, film, and haute couture fashion. He advances the self-coined movement of Hypersurrealism, in which he transcribes completed works from vivid, remembered dreams into material form. Yip's "Dream Pieces" articulate dialogues between conscious and subconscious domains, blending individual and collective cultural histories. His artistic practice, echoing Clement Greenberg's formalist theories, emphasizes the viewer's active role, inviting them to reflexively engage with his work. Yip's pieces challenge dichotomies between high and low art, abstract and representational, and spiritual and commercial aspects. Within this matrix, recurrent symbols—most pointedly the American flag—become sites for examining nationalism, cultural signification, and the tension between personal and collective identity.

Sheridan College admitted Yip to its world-renowned Baccalaureate of Animation degree program; he subsequently pursued sculpture at OCAD University. He exhibits internationally, including exhibitions at JanKossen Contemporary (New York), The Factory (London), the Gardiner Museum (Toronto), Artscape Youngplace (Toronto), Ignite Gallery (Toronto), the Daegu Art Fair, and the CICA Museum (South Korea). He contributed to Nuit Blanche Toronto in 2015 and 2016 and participated in the International Symposium for Visual Culture in 2022. His films have screened at festivals such as NewFilmmakers Los Angeles and the Cannes Indie Shorts Awards, aligning his moving-image work with his broader visual and sonic practice.

Yip's discography under the alias Discrete includes his debut album The Midas Touch (2016), which received a JUNO nomination from the Canadian Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences for Electronic Album of the Year. In 2019, his music video In My Room earned nominations for Keepin' It Weird from the Austin Music Video Festival and Best Cinematography from the Kinsale Shark Awards, alongside artists such as Prince and The Chemical Brothers. Editors featured his work in a four-page spread in RICE Contemporary Art Magazine Vol. 2, published alongside Marina Abramović; NewFilmmakers Los Angeles later nominated him for "Best of NFMLA" in 2021. He received an Ontario Arts Council Exhibition Assistance Grant (2021–2022), won first place at The Holy Art's INFINITY international group exhibition in London, and secured first place in the Art Gallery of Mississauga's 2021 Inaugural Juried Exhibition of Fine Arts. He received support from the Canada Council for the Arts for being selected as a finalist for the 17th Arte Laguna Prize from more than ten thousand works worldwide to exhibit at Marco Polo's Arsenale Nord in Venice. In 2025, his work will appear at EKA·Tianwu, Shanghai, as the Prize's Special Award.

Across media, Yip cultivates a rigorously structured, symbol-attentive practice that treats sound, surface, and sartorial elements as parallel instruments. He composes images, objects, and scores as interdependent, cross-registered systems: visual cadence meets sonic pattern; material facture mirrors musical phrasing. This sustained synthesis positions his output within larger conversations on contemporary image culture, vexillology and civic symbolism, and the ethics of spectatorship—inviting audiences to engage, consider, and contest how private vision can intersect public memory and shared meaning.