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 explores memory and the collective psyche through nature's unruliness and the female body. Drawing on ecofeminism, she treats nature as an atmosphere that holds buried memories of a matrilineal lineage. Yan works intuitively in loose marks and drips, abstracting motifs from the natural world and approaching mark-making as a record of embodied history. She often merges fragmented bodies with roots, moss and swamps. Trained in performance, she lets movement flow from her body into the paint, so that she performs through the figures in her paintings. These nebulous forms move between the human and the organic, resisting fixed binaries of body, environment and gender. Through them, she returns to cycles of womb, birth, decay and rebirth, where erased memories quietly pass through generations. Drawing on her background in literature, Yan also traces imagery from writers and poets such as Han Kang and Emily Dickinson. These poetic images feed a visual language that moves between figuration and abstraction, in which the forgotten returns uncannily through the female body and the land.

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), Queer Britain Museum (London, forthcoming), Edinburgh Fringe, Contact Theatre (Manchester) and Aotuspace Gallery (Beijing). In 2026, her work was selected for the Queer Britain Art Award and shortlisted for ArtEvol by London Art Collective.