Yuan Yuan was born in Hangzhou in 1973, and gained his Bachelor and Master of Fine Arts degrees from its China Academy of Arts, the alma mater of Zao Wou-Ki and Chu Teh-Chun. Trained in oil painting, he creates images of spacious, long-abandoned places with intense hyper-realist detail: his multiple layers of diluted pigment, inspired by traditional Chinese painting, render wet, light-flecked surfaces in an especially vivid way. Focusing on the small but ever-present human traces left, he evokes the buried history of each setting with extraordinary richness.
This has given him worldwide and quickly growing appeal: besides popular shows with his representative Kian Malingue in Paris, Hong Kong, and Shanghai, he had a suitably grand solo exhibition at the Palazzo Terzi, Bergamo, in 2018, and more recently participated in the ‘Beyond Baroque’ group show at Schloss Waldegg in Switzerland, 2022. He most recently shared an XY Gallery show with Kang Haitao in Guangzhou last year, and he has built up a very strong auction presence at Chinese auctions: his record, ‘The Other Side 3’ sold for $2.25 million HKD, with Christie’s Hong Kong in May 2018.