Yilin Zhang

Yilin Zhang (b. 1998, China) lives and works between Shanghai, London, and Athens, Georgia. She is currently pursuing a PhD in Art at the University of Georgia, after receiving her MA from the Royal College of Art and her BA from the China Academy of Art. Centered on painting, her practice also spans printmaking, installation, performance, and writing. Shaped by her transcultural experiences across China, the United Kingdom, and the United States, her work explores mysticism, trauma, mythology, monstrosity, supernatural phenomena, and science fiction through a comparative and intuitive lens. Her works have been exhibited internationally at venues including the LATITUDE Gallery New York, Venice Arsenale, Shanghai West Bund Art Center, Tate Modern, Ugly Duck, MartinGoya Home Gallery, and Lyndon House Art Center. Recently, she has been selected as the Finalist Artist of the 20th Arte Laguna Prize, the Lyndon House Merit Award Winner, and a top 10 artist in the 1st Hyper Youth Award.

In her recent series Fairy Child, Wild Rain (仙童乱雨) , she draws inspiration from Ming-Qing Chinese ghost and romance literature alongside New Weird fiction to explore the entangled relationships between human and more-than-human worlds. In her practice, innocence (纯情) is conceived as an experience of body horror. Writing and painting are woven together, spilling across one another through embodied, cross-media practices. Through body-mediated abstract paintings made with pastel and mixed media, ghostly beauty and seductive illusions begin to emerge across these imagined landscapes. Across these intertwined forms, she explores how qing (情)—a distinctly non-Western mode of affect emerges as an entangled, possessing, and incantatory force that inhabits worlds.

As an artist-scholar, her current research interests span non-Western Affect Studies, Research-Creation (Arts-Based Research), the Occult, Postcolonial and Decolonial Theory, SF and Speculative Pedagogy. She perceives her artistic practice, research, writing, and teaching as entangled entities, with their entanglement itself forming a worldbuilding practice. Yilin’s current research and pedagogical work has been presented at academic conferences and gatherings including the Society for the Study of Affect (SSA), the National Art Education Association (NAEA), and the London Arts-Based Research Centre.