Xinan Yang

My practice investigates the construction of memory, identity, and cultural belonging within conditions of digital mediation and transnational experience.
 

Working primarily through painting, I engage with both personal and found family photographs, approaching images not as stable records but as social and affective objects.

Through processes of translation, reinterpretation, and care, these images are reactivated as sites where relationships, distance, and inherited narratives intersect.
 

My work examines how “home” is reconfigured in contemporary life, where physical presence is increasingly displaced by digital visibility, and where memory operates between documentation and imagination. Rather than reconstructing fixed identities, I focus on states of in-betweenness — between presence and absence, intimacy and detachment, personal and collective memory.
 

Elements of magical realism emerge within my work as a way to articulate psychological and emotional realities that cannot be fully represented through literal depiction. Figures, objects, and domestic spaces become subtly destabilised, allowing symbolic and affective dimensions to surface. In this sense, magical realism functions not as an escape from reality, but as a method for engaging with experiences that exceed fixed spatial or narrative structures.
 

Painting, within my practice, operates as a critical and temporal medium that resists the speed of image circulation in digital culture. It creates a space for slowness, attention, and ethical engagement with images that no longer belong to a singular context.
 

Through this approach, “home” emerges not as a fixed location, but as an evolving psychological and relational condition. My work contributes to ongoing discussions around migration, digital identity, and the ethics of representation, positioning painting as a contemporary method for rethinking how we relate to images, memory, and each other.