Xinan Yang is a member of the British Academy and the Paul Mellon Centre ECRN, who integrates magical realism into deconstructed photographic art through painting, capturing her experiences of separation from her homeland and family. Her work creates a space that exists between the realms of imagination and reality. Yang’s paintings transcend the ordinary, becoming archives that explore the intricate relationships between personal identity, culture, digital space, and family dynamics. This interplay of magical realism evokes a deep contemplation of memory spaces that go beyond traditional boundaries, inviting a deeper exploration and understanding of the self in a globalized world.

Born in Southeast China, Yang infuses her work with the experiences of her displaced life, forming a unique symbolic language. By merging personal space with cultural identity, her work highlights the fluidity of human identity and the ambiguity of multiculturalism, creating a self-presented, geographically ambiguous space. For Yang, displacement is not an outcome but a state of self-formation, inviting the audience to traverse the liminal spaces between her disjointed realities.

Yang uses photographic references in her paintings, allowing her to recombine and recontextualize images, intertwining memory, place, and the subconscious. These scenes capture fleeting moments of life, depicting magical realism in imagined scenarios that transcend time and space within the painted environment. Often, Yang or her family members appear within the compositions. This approach emphasizes the fluidity between past and present, exploring the multifaceted nature of identity and revealing the complexities of belonging in a globalized world. This stream-of-consciousness narrative and subconscious intervals imbue her paintings with a unique narrativity, showcasing the latent transformations within the context of China’s development and change.

​