Zhan Yan | zh ā n y á n

Artist Zhanyan's personal website

Zhan Yan was born in Huangshi City, Hubei Province in 1984 and later moved to Zhongshan City, Guangdong Province. I received undergraduate and graduate education in sculpture at Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts from 2005 to 2013, and obtained both bachelor's and master's degrees. I have been teaching at the School of Sculpture and Public Art of Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts since 2015, and currently live and work in Guangzhou. Zhan Yan is mainly engaged in the creation of comprehensive media sculptures, and its artistic exploration covers various aspects such as material language, cultural symbols, and machine structures. The first solo exhibition "Handmade Surreality" was held in Shanghai in 2017. The second solo exhibition "God's Perspective" will be held in Beijing in 2021. His works have won important awards multiple times and have been collected by multiple art museums, institutions, and collectors both domestically and internationally.

Zhan Yan is a studio artist because his works usually require deep processing to complete. Relatively speaking, he prefers a creative approach that requires careful consideration and experimentation, rather than direct emotional expression. In addition, he is more interested in highly formalized, conceptualized, and regulated elements, which he believes have been highly refined and emphasize the inherent laws of human thinking; This is more appealing to him than art forms that emphasize intuitiveness and vividness. Zhan Yan has always adhered to the approach of "evolving his own works" to continue his creative process. Every time he completes a piece of work, he wonders if there is still a possibility of extending it. Adding new elements to the previous work or expressing it in another way can lead to a certain evolution of the work, thus forming a new one. Over time, works will form a mutual relationship similar to a "family tree". This is what the research institute expects to achieve.