Yuri Yuan (b. 1996, Harbin, China) paints surrealist scenes featuring ambiguous and physically impossible figure-landscape relationships to explore existentialist themes of longing and loss. Through visual symbolism, metaphors, and magical realism, the artist explores the ways in which exterior landscapes become projections of her and her audience’s interior psychological states.
Yuan holds a Visual Arts MFA from Columbia University, New York, NY and a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL. Yuan was a recipient of the Helen Frankenthaler Scholarship at Columbia University in 2020, and Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grant in 2019, 2022, and 2024. She was an artist-in-residence at Silver Art Projects Residency. The artist’s work has been exhibited at Alexander Berggruen, NY; Make Room Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; Haverkampf Leistenschneider, Berlin, GE; and Galerie Rolando Anselmi, Rome, IT; among others. Her work is represented in the public collections of Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus, OH and The Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, CA. Yuan’s work has been featured in Forbes Magazine’s “30 Under 30,” The Brooklyn Rail, Sound and Vision Podcast, Galerie Magazine, and Refinery29, to name a few. She lives and works in Jersey City, NJ.