Interview
Yanhua Feng
Yanhua Feng (b. 1965) is a Chinese-born artist based in San Francisco, with studios in Vancouver and Beijing. Her path to painting has moved across disciplines, cultures, and roles. In the 1990s, she trained in design and led large-scale national visual projects, including commemorative work for the return of Hong Kong and the design of the China Women and Children’s Museum. Her visual foundation was shaped during a time of sweeping social transition, when image-making carried both state symbolism and personal longing. Feng returned to painting gradually, in moments carved out of domestic life. After relocating to Canada, she spent over a decade immersed in caregiving, sketching quietly between responsibilities. When her daughter left for university in the United States, Feng moved to the Bay Area and reentered the studio with an urgency shaped by years of waiting and observing.
Her paintings, often large in scale, evoke presence without portraiture. Figures lean, dissolve, hover. Brushstrokes bleed and warp. Color becomes atmosphere, boundary, or refusal. Working primarily in acrylic on canvas, she constructs layered surfaces that hold contradiction: softness and threat, silence and saturation, nearness and opacity. Though abstract, her work responds to the emotional architecture of contemporary life - its intimacy, its tension, and its shifting terrain of care. Female bodies, domestic spaces, and unspoken gestures recur not as subjects, but as emotional weather. Her recent exhibitions include the Venice Biennale in Italy, the Salon des Artistes Indépendants (Art Capital) at the Grand Palais in Paris, and a public art presentation in New York’s Times Square. Across all formats, Feng’s work explores how ambiguity and tenderness can carry weight - both personally and politically - in today’s world.
What is your background and how did you start your journey in the art world?
“I was born in China in 1965, and my path into art has never been a straight line. I trained in design and worked on large national visual projects during the 1990s – at a time when images carried both political weight and personal yearning. Back then, I wasn’t just making art – I was navigating what it meant to create in a system that had strong opinions about meaning. Later, after moving to Canada and then the U.S., I returned to painting in a slower, more private way. I sketched while raising a child, while caregiving, while waiting. And when life opened up again, I reentered the studio with urgency. I now live and work in San Francisco, with studios in Beijing and Vancouver. My work has shifted over time, but it always comes from that space between constraint and imagination.”
What does your work aim to say? Does it comment on any current social or political issues?
“Yes, but not in a direct or didactic way. I’m interested in how personal experiences – like caregiving, intimacy, waiting – are actually shaped by bigger systems. There’s a quiet politics in the way we touch, the way we hide things, the way we hold back. In my recent series, Where Clarity Breaks, I question our obsession with neatness: emotionally, visually, socially. We’re taught to be ‘clean,’ to define ourselves clearly, to make everything make sense. But what happens when things blur – when our emotions don’t resolve, or our identities don’t fit into simple categories? My work pushes into that discomfort. It’s about staying with the messy, the unresolved, the not-quite-right – and showing that ambiguity can be its own form of truth.”
Do you plan your work in advance, or is it improvisation?
“I start with a feeling, not a plan. My paintings often begin with a texture or a tension I want to explore. From there, it’s a process of layering, scraping, drifting. I rarely know what a piece will become when I begin, and that’s important to me. Improvisation allows the work to stay alive. I want the canvas to surprise me, to push back. I think the best moments come when I’m not controlling everything – when something unexpected emerges through the process.”
“There are so many things we can’t explain easily – grief, longing, intimacy, silence – and painting gives me a place to hold those things without fixing them into neat answers.”
Are there any art world trends you are following?
“I’m not a trend-driven artist, but I do pay attention to how artists today are challenging fixed ideas – especially around identity, care, and perception. I’m drawn to work that blurs boundaries: between abstraction and figuration, between private emotion and public space. I also appreciate that more artists are engaging with the politics of the body – how it’s read, controlled, or erased. There’s a lot of important work happening around softness, refusal, and vulnerability as forms of resistance, and I feel aligned with that.”
What process, materials and techniques do you use to create your artwork?
“I work primarily with acrylic on canvas. I use traditional brushes, but also tools like scrapers, cloth, and my hands. The surface is constantly being built and undone – I apply paint, then erase it, then blur it, then rebuild it again. I’m not interested in clean edges or polished finishes. I want the surface to feel lived in, like it’s holding memory. I often layer thin washes with thicker gestures, allowing some parts to dissolve while others push forward. It’s a balance of control and accident. Each piece is a slow accumulation of choices, erasures, and impulses.”
What does your art mean to you?
“It’s a way of staying honest. There are so many things we can’t explain easily – grief, longing, intimacy, silence – and painting gives me a place to hold those things without fixing them into neat answers. My art is also a space of refusal. Refusal to be clean, to be efficient, to be resolved. In a world that rewards clarity and productivity, I want to make work that stays with the awkward, the ambiguous. It’s not about rejecting structure – it’s about showing there’s truth in what doesn’t fit.”
What’s your favourite artwork and why?
“That’s a hard one – it changes all the time. But one piece I always return to is Cecily Brown’s ‘The Girl Who Had Everything.’ I love how her brushstrokes feel wild but intentional, how the figures dissolve and re-form without ever settling. There’s a physicality to her work that’s both urgent and vulnerable. I see her paintings not as answers but as invitations. They let you get lost. And I think that’s powerful – to make space for confusion, desire, contradiction – all at once.”
Have you had any noteworthy exhibitions you'd like to share?
“I’ve been fortunate to show my work internationally, including at the Venice Biennale and the Grand Palais in Paris. But one of the most meaningful experiences was a public art project in Times Square, New York. Seeing my work on that scale – in such a charged, chaotic place – shifted how I think about intimacy and public space. In 2025, I also worked on a cross-disciplinary music video art project that blended painting, performance, and sound. It pushed me to think about how painting can move – not just visually, but emotionally and physically – across mediums.”
Website: yanhuafeng.com
Instagram: @yanhua_art
