Wendi Yan

Biography

Wendi Yan is an artist, writer, technologist and historian of science, born in 1999 in Beijing. She holds an A.B. in History of Science from Princeton University, where she received the Horace H. Wilson '25 Senior Thesis Prize, and an M.S. in Fiction and Entertainment from SCI-Arc. She builds speculative worlds from research, CGI, game engines and material experiments. Her work connects scientific research, Daoist philosophy and speculative media, and it often models imagined scientific devices and technological creatures. She works with Unreal Engine and 3D simulation, and she makes photolithographic copper plates using UV setups adapted from semiconductor manufacturing. Her 2026 works include The Cosmos Breathes Through a Porous Body, a video first made for a 100-meter LED screen at Kai Tak Stadium in Hong Kong, the painting series Mountains of My Becoming, and the copper plate series Conductive Cartographies. She won the Grand Prix of the 6th VH Award from Hyundai Motor Group in 2025 and was a Steve Jobs Archive Fellow. Her residencies include A24 Labs, NEW INC at the New Museum, Eyebeam and the Arctic Circle expedition. Her work has been shown at Ars Electronica, the ArtScience Museum in Singapore, Kai Tak Art Week and Ujazdowski Castle in Warsaw. BANK represents her. She also directs the Revival Fund, an experimental grant program that restores lost research, and her film Dream of Walnut Palaces won the VH Award. She is part of the duo show To Make a World Out of Sediment and Sky with Camilla Alberti at ArtVerse in Paris, curated by Valentina Buzzi and inspired by Ursula K. Le Guin's Always Coming Home. For collectors, she is a young artist whose work sits between game-engine film, sculpture and scientific research.