Xiaojing Yan

Xiaojing Yan is a China-born, Markham-based artist whose practice spans painting, sculpture, installation, and public art. Her work explores ecological systems, cultural memory, material transformation, and the ways living and constructed environments shape one another.

Drawing on Chinese aesthetic traditions, mythology, migration, and close observation of the natural world, Yan works with materials ranging from paint and ink to Lingzhi mushrooms, freshwater pearls, pine needles, cicada shells, plants, and paper. Across media, she is interested in processes of growth, accumulation, adaptation, and change, often allowing material behaviour, organic processes, and time to become active elements in the work.

After more than two decades focused primarily on sculpture and installation, Yan has recently returned to painting. Her new paintings extend the spatial and ecological thinking of her three-dimensional practice into layered fields of line, colour, gesture, and material process.

Yan’s work has been exhibited internationally at the Royal Ontario Museum, Suzhou Museum, Canadian Cultural Centre in Paris, Hermès Maison Shanghai, Sharjah Art Museum, Contemporary Calgary, and the Nevada Museum of Art. Her sculpture Lingzhi Girl appeared on the cover of Art in America, and her writing has been published in Leonardo by MIT Press.