Visite guidée réservée aux membres de France Alumni : exposition « Dreamland » à la Maison Hermès

YAN holds an M.F.A in Sculpture from Indiana University of Pennsylvania, USA and a B.F.A from Nanjing Arts Institute, China.

Yan’s migration experience from China to Canada provided her with a unique perspective through which she integrates the long history of Chinese traditions and rituals into her contemporary, global understanding of the natural world.

Yan approaches a central theme of the gaps between the foundations of Western and Eastern ways of knowing. In much of Western philosophy, culture and nature exist as a duality, two very different and segmented arenas of everyday life. In Chinese philosophy, however, the two are viewed as an inseparable continuum, they are one and the same. As such, Yan brings into her practice the idea that every living thing is imbued with a spirit – a vitality or ch’i that through which the viewer might uncover some of what is lost in translation between languages and ways of knowing. Yan offers an optimistic vision of the seemingly unbridgeable gaps between the East and the West, between the past and the present, between culture and nature, and ultimately between life and death.