Xinyan Yu "Before the Dawn Forgets Her"

Xinyan Yu "Before the Dawn Forgets Her" 2025

Xinyan Yu (b. 1988, Changchun, China) is an artist based in New York. Her life and work span China, the United Kingdom, and the United States, forming an important background for her practice. She works primarily in oil painting. Her work begins with memory and bodily perception, gradually unfolding as an exploration of transformation. It attends to cycles of fragility, resilience, and renewal. Influenced by illness, motherhood, and migration, she has developed a visual language grounded in bodily perception, drawing upon nature, feminine energy, and intuition to shape forms and structures in her paintings. Through organic forms and fluid gestures, Yu creates inner landscapes that emerge from shifting emotional states. She highlights the evolving dialogue between inner emotional worlds and the external environment, revealing the rhythms of life and the invisible forces that sustain it. By intertwining biomorphic shapes with dreamlike environments, she transmutes impassioned energy into visual form, blurring the line between abstraction and emotion, body and spirit. Yu’s work has been exhibited in New York and throughout the United States, including at Hudson Valley MOCA, New Bedford Art Museum, Viridian Artists Gallery, BAU Gallery, and Suffolk Art Gallery.

Artist Statement
"My painting practice explores the intersection of memory, transformation, and embodied experience. Moving between abstraction and figuration, I investigate how emotional states and bodily perception can be translated into spatial environments. Working primarily with oil paint, I build layered surfaces through fluid gestures, shifting light, and organic forms. Fragments of the human figure often emerge within atmospheric fields of color, where landscape becomes a psychological space rather than a literal environment. In these paintings, the body is not a fixed subject but a shifting presence embedded within the surrounding world. Drawing from experiences of motherhood, illness, and migration, my work reflects on the tension between vulnerability and resilience, rupture and renewal. These experiences shape my interest in how the body holds memory and how transformation unfolds across both internal and external landscapes. Through luminous color, gestural movement, and ambiguous spatial structures, my paintings seek to visualize states of becoming—moments where body, memory, and environment dissolve into one another." - Xinyan Yu