Faye Yan (b. 1999) is an artist working across painting and performance. 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 as atmospheres that hold 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, desire, and disorientation 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, and her multidisciplinary 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).