Xinan Yang’s painting practice engages with the fragile conditions of family, memory, and belonging in a contemporary context where these structures can no longer be assumed as stable. While her early work emerged from personal experiences of displacement and cultural separation, her practice has gradually shifted away from identity as a fixed subject, toward a sustained attention to relationships that persist even when belonging fails, and to the images and spaces through which those relationships are negotiated.

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Working primarily through painting and photographic reference, Yang examines how family experiences are recorded, mediated, and encountered once they are no longer held within a shared space. Her images often depict moments of waiting, suspension, or quiet separation—bodies remain present, while relationships unfold elsewhere, increasingly shaped by digital communication and distance. Rather than reconstructing personal narratives or restoring a sense of home, her work stays with states of incompletion, where connection continues without resolution.

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Visually, Yang works within a mode of magical realism that does not depart from everyday life, but subtly distorts it. Doors, light, animals, and staged domestic spaces recur as structural elements, allowing emotional tensions and psychological distance to surface without being explicitly narrated. Abstraction appears only intermittently, not as a stylistic destination, but as a necessary interruption when experience can no longer be carried by figurative space.

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For Yang, painting functions as a slow and ethical practice—a way of remaining with what cannot be fully recovered or resolved. Her work asks how care, attention, and responsibility might continue when images, memories, and relationships lose clear ownership—not only for the artist, but for those who encounter the work. Rather than offering answers about home or identity, her practice proposes a way of staying with uncertainty, and of sustaining relationships without possession, completion, or return.