New York-based photographer Hang Yu has spent months inside the wonderfully peculiar world of clowning, documenting the students of Coney Island Clown Skool as they learn to become someone else. Her ongoing series, 'The Show Goes On', follows aspiring clowns from their first day, when they are handed a hat, sent on stage to improvise and then dispatched backstage to choose a clown nose, through performances and into their everyday lives.

One of her favourite images from the project shows a collection of clown noses waiting to be picked, a moment she describes as full of possibility, when nothing has been decided yet. The series has grown into a collaboration: as the school's resident photographer, she has got to know the students, photographed their shows and followed them beyond the classroom. In one image, a fellow clown named Velvet asked to photograph Hang herself, and after a quick camera lesson the two swapped roles, with Hang stepping in front of the lens in her own clown persona.

Born and raised in China, Hang moved to the United States at seventeen to study art, first in Chicago and later in New York, where she now works as a freelance photographer and artist. Her interest in photography began in her teens in Beijing, exploring exhibitions and underground clubs, and she modelled for the late Chinese photographer Ren Hang before picking up a 35mm camera herself. Her work is shaped by filmmakers such as Jia Zhangke and Alejandro Jodorowsky and by artists including Nikki S. Lee, Sophie Calle and Diane Arbus.

At its core, the project is about how people construct identity, the communities they find and the roles they play within them. Hang is drawn to uniforms and the way they can label a person while also revealing a relationship to something larger, whether a profession, a community or a political structure. With another Clown Skool session beginning in November, she is returning for the next chapter of the series and gathering photographs and interviews for a forthcoming photobook.