Yan Xing was born in Chongqing in southwest China in 1986. He graduated from the oil-painting department of the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute in 2009. He currently lives in Los Angeles and Beijing.
Yan Xing has created a complex body of work that reflects critically on the ways in which history is manufactured. He interrogates literature, history and the history of art to draw attention to connections between negativity, resistance and order. In 2012 he won the Chinese Contemporary Art Award for Best Young Artist, received a nomination for the Future Generation Art Prize, Pinchuk Art Center (Kiev), and was named as one of ten artists in the Focus on Talents Project of the Today Art Museum in Beijing. His works are in public collections including the Rubell Family Collection, Miami; M+ Museum for Visual Culture, Hong Kong; KADIST, Paris; He Xiangning Art Museum, Shenzhen.
Yan Xing is both initiator and participant in the artists’ collective, COMPANY. He has also curated exhibitions such as: Dream Plant, Sichuan Fine Arts Institute, Chongqing (2007); Mummery, Art Channel, Beijing (2010); and the Fact Study Institute, Yangtze River Space, Wuhan (2011).
Yan was featured at the 7th Shenzhen Sculpture Biennale (2012); the 3rd Moscow International Biennale for Young Art (2012); and the 3rd Ural Industrial Biennial of Contemporary Art (2015). The Kunsthalle Basel presented Yan Xing: Dangerous Afternoon, curated by Elena Filipovic (2017), and exhibited and performed at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam (2016). Group exhibitions include Teetering at the Edge of the World, Espacio de Arte Contemporáneo, Montevideo, Uruguay (2015); Chercher le garçon, Musée d’Art Contemporain du Val-de-Marne, Vitry-sur-Seine, France (2015); Traveling Alone, Tromsø Kunstforening, Norway (2015); Sui Generis, Tenuta Dello Scompiglio, Capannori, Italy (2016); De leur temps 5: Le temps de L’audace et de l’engagement, Institut d’Art Contemporain, Villeurbanne, France (2016); Spectrosynthesis, Museum of Contemporary Art, Taipei, Taiwan (2017).