Faye Yan (b. 1999, Beijing) is a Manchester-based artist working across painting and performance. She holds a BA in Comparative Literature from the University of California, Los Angeles, and an MA in Performance Making from Goldsmiths, University of London.

Yan's practice explores the unruliness of nature, memory and collective psyche through an ecofeminist imagination. Nature runs through her work as atmosphere that holds buried memories. Her paintings often merge fragmented bodies with organic forms such as branches, moss and swamps. These figures move between the human and the organic, resisting fixed binaries of body, environment and gender. Underneath this runs a displaced queerness expressed through gesture and residue. Working intuitively, Yan embraces the uncontrollable nature of paint and treats the canvas as a site where erased memory and repressed desire can surface in layers. Drawing on her background in literature, Yan traces fragments of imagery from writers and poets such as Han Kang and Emily Dickinson. These poetic images urge her to articulate states of intimacy and instability situated in natural and spiritual spheres in forms that move between figuration and abstraction.

Movement remains central to Yan’s process. Her performance work engages generational and matriarchal trauma, displacement, and the erasure of collective memory through durational actions that leave embodied marks on paper.

Yan has held artist residencies in Finland and Scotland. Her work has been exhibited and performed in London, Los Angeles, Beijing, Edinburgh and Manchester, including Southbank Centre (London), Edinburgh Fringe, Contact Theatre (Manchester) and Aotuspace Gallery (Beijing). In 2026, her work was shortlisted for ArtEvol by London Art Collective.