Xinan Yang

Xinan Yang’s painting practice explores family, memory, time, and belonging. Emerging from personal experiences of displacement and cultural separation, her work has gradually shifted from questions of where one belongs towards how relationships endure across time and distance.

As her own sense of home has become more settled, Yang has come to realise that what cannot truly be fixed is not place, but the time shared with those we love. Her recent work considers the finite nature of togetherness and the ways care can persist through presence, absence, memory, and change.

Working between figuration and magical realism, Yang allows reality to shift, distort, or move towards abstraction. For her, painting is a slow practice of attention and care: not a means of preserving the past, but a way of living with time, and of holding traces of experiences that cannot ultimately be kept.

Doctor of Arts (Doctor of Professional Fine Art) Sep 2020 - Oct 2023
University of East London
Master of Fine Arts (MFA) Sep 2018 - Jun 2020
University of the Arts London
Bachelor of Arts (BA) Sep 2013 - Jun 2017
Communication University of China, Nanjing

Solo Exhibitions
2022 Missing Place Missing Face, Taymour Grahne Projects, London
2024 Laurderdale House, UK

GROUP EXHIBITIONS
2024
MK Calling 2024, Milton Keynes, UK
Phony, Brighton Gallery LockIn, UK
In The Water, Hackney Wick Bath, UK
Look If You Want, Peckham Peclian, UK
Rome International Art Fair, Italy
Mick Jagger Centre, UK(Upcoming)
2023
Diaspora and Belonging, Mother London, UK
House of Anneta, ‘Home Away From Home’， UK
Spitalfields Studio, ‘New Wave’， UK
2022
Muse, Candid Arts Gallery, UK
Fine Art Alumni 2020, Chelsea College of Arts, UK
2021
Contemporary Domesticity, Taymour Grahne Projects, UK
Emergent Vision, Uncovered Collective, UK
2020
Saatchi Gallery, London Grads Now, UK
Deptford Does Art, Gods Devils & Software Engineers,
Wall without wall, Online
Sprout Art, 10 Degrees +, UK
2019
Platform Southwark, Emergency, UK
The Crypt Gallery, Immurement, UK
Wimbledon Colleges of Arts, Collaborative Corridor Exhibition
UK Ugly Duck, Postoptia, London, UK