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Yanhua Feng (b. 1965)
Yanhua Feng is a Chinese-born contemporary artist based in San Francisco, with studios in Vancouver and Beijing. Her work moves fluidly between abstraction and perceptual figuration. Through layered brushwork, tactile surfaces, and ambiguous forms, she explores the emotional architecture of care, memory, and identity. Her large-scale acrylic paintings invite viewers into spaces that are intuitive, open-ended, and deeply felt.
Biography
Feng trained at the Central Academy of Arts and Design (now part of Tsinghua University) and began her career in 1990s Beijing during a period of rapid visual and cultural transformation. She led nationally recognized design projects, including the official gift design for the 1997 Hong Kong handover and the design of the China Women and Children’s Museum. These early experiences shaped her understanding of visual culture as a space where public symbols and private interiority intersect.
After relocating to Canada, Feng stepped away from her practice for over a decade to care for her family. Her return to painting began quietly - built on sketches made between daily obligations. When her daughter left for college, she moved to the San Francisco Bay Area and reentered the studio with a sense of urgency. Since then, she has developed a distinctive visual language shaped by movement across disciplines, cultures, and phases of life.
Feng’s paintings resist easy categorization. Though influenced by Western abstract expressionism, her work is equally shaped by Eastern ideas of space - fluidity, stillness, and openness. Her compositions often evoke fragments of textiles, limbs, or plants, hovering between clairty and collapse. Through a cross-cultural and female perspective, she explores the emotional layers of identity, invisibility, and intergenerational care.
Current Conceptual Focus
In her recent series, Feng turns toward ambiguity, softness, and emotional residue - not as retreat, but as artistic stance. In a visual culture driven by clarity and speed, she chooses slowness, dissonance, and uncertainity. Abstraction becomes a way to hold what cannot be neatly named: shifting roles, unresolved emotions, and the weight of domestic space.
Her paintings resist closure. Color is not merely compositional - it becomes atmosphere, pressure, or even refusal. Fragmented bodies drift, lean, or dissolve, pushing back against the logic of wholeness. Rather than reflecting the structural certainty favored by modernist ideals, her work leans into vulnerability and contraditions, offering a visual language grounded in complexity and care.
In a time marked by idenity anxiety and cultural tension, Feng’s work offers a different kind of resistance - not loud or confrontational, but quite, persistent, and open. It’s a space where softness becomes strength, and ambiguity becomes a way of seeing.