YE FAN

Born in 1986, Ye Fan is a visiting scholar at Loughborough University, UK, and currently teaches at Hubei Institute of Fine Arts. She received her PhD from the Department of Fine Arts, National Taiwan Normal University in 2021; she received her Master’s degree from the Department of Chinese Painting, Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts in 2014.

Ye’s painting is a record of time, perception, and inner experience. Working primarily with xuan paper, brush, and ink, her practice attends to the relationships that emerge among line, plane, and the paper surface. Through precise, subtle, and quietly embedded brush marks, her works preserve the moments in which the body, breath, emotion, and acts of looking pass across the paper, allowing vague, uncertain, and fleeting sensations to gradually take form. In this process, she constructs a quiet, fluid space imbued with a sense of duration.

For Ye, painting is not a representation of reality, but a slow and sustained act. While line is concrete, space tends toward abstraction; while traces are visible, they point toward memory, time, emptiness, stillness, and feelings that resist precise articulation through language. Through repeated engagement with her materials, she allows personal experience to settle within the pictorial surface, making painting a way to perceive the passage of time and to hold inner experience.