Yan Xing

Thief
2015
HD video (color, silent)
16′19″
Tales from a Small New England Town
2016
Found photographs, found documents, archival materials
Yan Xing is known for his multi-component, interdisciplinary projects that combine diverse media such as performance, video, photography, installation and painting. Yan Xing has built a complex, compelling body of work that reflects critically on how history is manufactured today. Through the intensive investigation of literature, history, and art theory, he has worked out an artistic narrative governed by its own logic. His works circulate around large themes such as negativity, resistance, and order, exploring their complex interrelations.

Yan Xing was born in Chongqing in 1986. He graduated from the Oil Painting department of the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute in 2009. In the same year, he moved to Beijing and founded Studio Yan Xing. In 2012 Yan Xing won the Chinese Contemporary Art Award for Best Young Artist; that year, he also received a nomination for the Future Generation Art Prize from the Pinchuk Art Centre and Focus on Talents Project from Today Art Museum.