Faye Yan (b. 1999) is an artist working across painting, performance and video. Born in Beijing, she has lived in Los Angeles and London, and is currently based in Manchester. 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, the female body, and collective and personal memory through an ecofeminist imagination. Nature runs through her work not as landscape but as atmospheres, holding buried yet specific memories. Her figures move between the human and the organic, resisting fixed binaries of body, nature and gender. Underneath this runs a displaced queer desire, one without a permitted shape or object, surfacing instead through gesture and residue. 

After years working primarily in performance and video, she has recently returned to painting as a way of resurfacing childhood memory and rebuilding a direct, embodied relationship to mark-making, one she had lost through years of critical distance. Her paintings merge fragmented figures with organic forms such as branches, swamps and decaying matter, treating the canvas as a site where erased memory, desire and disorientation can surface intuitively, in layers. Drawing on her background in literature, Yan's work moves between figuration and abstraction, articulating states of intimacy and instability situated in natural and spiritual spheres.

As a painter and dancer, movement remains central to Yan’s process. Her performance work engages generational and matriarchal trauma, displacement, and the erasure of memory tied to her hometown, through durational actions that leave embodied marks on paper.

She has held artist residencies in Finland and Scotland, and her multidisciplinary work has been exhibited and performed in London, Los Angeles, Beijing, Edinburgh and Manchester, including Southbank Centre (London), Edinburgh Fringe, Hollywood Fringe, Contact Theatre (Manchester) and Aotuspace Gallery (Beijing).