BIO

Xiaojing Yan is a China-born, Canada-based artist whose practice moves across cultural memory, ecological systems, material transformation, and public space. Drawing on Chinese aesthetic traditions, mythology, and her lived experience of migration, she creates sculptural installations, public artworks, and spatial frameworks shaped by processes of growth, adaptation, and change.

Working with materials including Lingzhi mushrooms, freshwater pearls, pine needles, cicada shells, plants, and paper, Yan often allows organic processes, duration, and transformation to become active collaborators in the work. Her practice ranges from intimate material investigations to large-scale installations, landscape interventions, permanent public artworks, and architecture-integrated commissions.

Across studio, institutional, and public contexts, Yan works at the intersection of art, architecture, landscape, and civic space. She translates site histories, ecological systems, cultural symbolism, community narratives, and architectural conditions into artistic strategies that shape how people encounter place, memory, and the more-than-human world.

Yan’s work has been exhibited internationally at the Royal Ontario Museum, Chinese American Arts Council / Gallery 456 in New York, Suzhou Museum, the Canadian Cultural Centre in Paris, Hermès Maison Shanghai, Sharjah Art Museum, Richmond Art Gallery, Varley Art Gallery, Contemporary Calgary, and the Nevada Museum of Art. Her public artworks and commissions include Cloudscape and Tiger’s Embrace for the Royal Ontario Museum, Emergence and Into the Dreams for Hermès Shanghai, The Underground Sun in Markham, Contours of Connection in Brampton, and Ephemeral Reverie in Burlington.

Yan has received the 2026 David Suzuki Foundation Rewilding Arts Prize, the InStyle Women InCreation Prize, a Chalmers Arts Fellowship, and grants from the Canada Council for the Arts and Ontario Arts Council. Her sculpture Lingzhi Girl appeared on the cover of Art in America, and her writing has been published in Leonardo by MIT Press. She holds an MFA from Indiana University of Pennsylvania and a BFA from Nanjing University of the Arts.

 

ARTIST STATEMENT

My practice investigates living systems as sculptural collaborators. Working across installation, bio-material processes, and immersive environments, I explore how matter grows, binds, decays, and transforms beyond human intention. Rather than treating nature as subject, I approach it as an active force that reshapes the work over time.

I am drawn to materials that hold both physical presence and cultural memory: pine needles, freshwater pearls, Lingzhi mushrooms, cicada exuviate. These materials carry histories, rituals, and symbolic weight, yet they also behave according to their own biological and structural logics. In my work, they are neither illustrations of tradition nor decorative references. They are agents. They resist control, introduce contingency, and insist on duration.

Underlying this engagement is a relational worldview informed by Daoist thought, in which reality is understood as dynamic interdependence rather than fixed hierarchy. This philosophical lineage does not appear as iconography, but as structure. Transformation is not a theme; it is a condition. Each work unfolds through negotiation between human design and organic process.

In projects such as Spirit Cloud, Mountain of Pines, and my Lingzhi sculptures, thousands of individual elements accumulate into forms that oscillate between organism and landscape. When cultivating Lingzhi, I initiate growth by setting environmental conditions, but eventually the mycelium binds the structure on its own terms. At that point, authorship shifts. I step back. The sculpture continues to evolve.

I am increasingly interested in the tension between technological control and ecological unpredictability. I design controlled environments that gradually yield to organic processes, allowing instability and emergence to become visible. This movement from imposition to collaboration reflects both my lived experience across cultures and a broader inquiry into how humans inhabit more-than-human systems.

My work proposes sculpture not as object, but as ecology. It is a site where biological forces, cultural memory, and human intention intersect, revealing the fragile, transformative networks that sustain life.

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