Yuri Yuan b. 1996, Harbin, China

Yuri Yuan (b. 1996) was born in Harbin, China and raised in Singapore. She has received a BFA from Art Institute of Chicago and a MFA from Columbia University. The Critic John Yau has described Yuan’s paintings as “understated, but… signal[ing] a significant shift in consciousness.” Yuan takes as subject the everyday, capturing a mundanity and emptiness in even the most surreal scenes. Her delicate palette emphasizes a fundamental emptiness of the modern condition, a loneliness that follows her female protagonists from the city to the countryside, from reality into dream. By emphasizing the unexplainable, Yuan’s works represent a new, achingly contemporary sea change for figurative painting.

Yuan was a recipient of the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation scholarship in 2020, and the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grant in 2019. Yuan currently lives and works in New York, NY. Yuan has exhibited work at Center for the Arts, Umbria, Italy; Make Room Los Angeles; Asia Art Center, Taipei; Alexander Bergguen, New York, and the Columbus Museum of Art.