Feiyi Wen b. 1990
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Download Artist's CV
Feiyi Wen (b.1990, Beijing) lives and works in London. She holds a Masters degree in Photography from The Royal College of Art and a practice-led PhD in Fine Art from the Slade School of Fine Art, UCL. Wen’s practice is a meditation on duality—East and West, human and machine, analogue and digital. Rooted in the traditions of East Asian landscape painting and the mechanised aesthetics of early 20th-century Japan and China, her work bridges historical disciplines in a contemporary space. Much like Franz Gertsch, Wen’s photography strives for a rightness among all represented elements. Through repeatedly scanning and reprinting the original image, her works shed their photographic precision and acquire a painterly softness—a texture echoing the ink-wash paintings of her birthplace.
Feiyi Wen’s work has been exhibited at the Academy of Visual Art, Hong Kong (2019); Aperture Gallery, New York (2019); ONCA Gallery and Outdoor Hub, Brighton (2018); Three Shadows Photography Art Centre, Beijing (2018); Cosmos Arles Book, Arles (2018); and The Slade School of Fine Art, London (2018). Earlier presentations include Fabrica, Brighton (2017); Photo Oxford, Oxford (2017); Roaming ROOM, London (2017); Industria Superstudios, Brooklyn, New York (2016); SPACE 22 Gallery, Seoul (2016); Exeter Phoenix, Exeter (2016); CAFA Library, Beijing (2015); OBJECTIFS, Singapore (2015); Photo Shanghai, Shanghai (2015); Gucang Contemporary Photo Gallery, Lanzhou (2015); and Tate Britain, London (2014).
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Selected Works
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Exhibitions
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Past Exhibitions
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Borrowed Landscapes, two person show with Feiyi Wen and Ke Peng, Chanel Nexus Hall, Tokyo, Japan, 22 May - 15 July 2024
This exhibition juxtaposes significant new bodies of work by two pioneering Chinese artists, Feiyi Wen and Peng Ke. Both artists were born in China during the economic miracle of the 1990s, and have gone on to study, live and work abroad. Each has practices rooted in photography, yet both have expanded outward to explore different media and techniques while remaining somehow lens based. Both create images that are artistically beautiful but also embody contradictions and ambiguity.
This exhibition will display important new bodies of work by each artist. Feiyi Wen has selected photographs which relate to and expand on her recent chapters. She is using a variety of sizes, both small and large, while alternating between the printing techniques of silver gelatin and giclee. The resulting photographs will be framed in Japan and arranged in the space in accordance with the exhibition scenography, creating a sense of visual variation and exploration. Peng Ke, meanwhile, is making six wall assemblages that expand and develop her concerns from her Bay Windows works shown at the Tai Kwun Contemporary art space in Hong Kong in 2022. These will include material elements drawn from contemporary China, as well as photographs that have been pushed and manipulated in new directions.While the connection between these two artists may not be instantly apparent, they both represent ways of looking thoughtfully at our contemporary situation, and they both play on the unique power of the image to resonate along different, contradictory registers at the same time. In this sense, they could be seen as two ends of a continuum, from the thoughtful contemplation of forms found in nature to the ambivalent embrace of the objects and typologies that convey social distinction. Of course, both positions contain their opposite—Feiyi’s seemingly natural imagery is highly controlled and edited, while Peng’s ready-mades exist as both signifiers and physical objects.By intricately staging a dialogue between these two artists and their practices, this exhibition will not only present two significant figures in a new generation of Chinese contemporary artists. It will invite the viewer to think about their relation to their physical, social and even philosophical surroundings.
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Through the mouth of the river, Serchia Gallery, Bristol, UK, 22 July - 2 September 2023
In her research-led work, Feiyi Wen investigates the concepts of different ways of looking and showing landscape through textual examination and image-making. She started this project initially due to her own frustration on the difficulties of contextualising my works within different layers of translation. Translating one aesthetic experience or concepts to another are not just about the language but also cultural.The term Qing Jing Jiao Rong 情景交融(fusion of scene and emotion) derived from Chinese literary theory, which describe the merge of the interaction between subjective emotion. Nishida Kitaro’s notion of Basho(place) contributed a similar idea of a place ‘where subject and object, man and nature come together.’ The unification of the perceiving subject and the object is the ‘landscape’ on which evidently Chinese and Japanese traditional practices are built. Through looking into her own heritage, she has further explored the non-western view on the dichotomy of subject-object relation. By intentionally removing the traces of man-made features within the landscape, she aims to echo the ideas of ‘one-body’ which blurred the boundary of the existing binary relationship between the perceived subject and object. It also allows a more fluid viewing experience by inviting multiple parallelism imagery to come into play as juxtaposition rather than the direct metaphor of the singular reading.She explores different materials and surfaces within my image-making process, it involves traditional darkroom process and alternative printing options as well as printmaking methods. By combining different techniques, she draws parallels between my photographic practice, pictorialism and traditional Chinese painting with respect to the framing, tonality and non-specificity of the place. Her investigation of lighting printing methods and surfaces are methods for researching the space of the photograph.
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Our Vision is Clouded, Warbling Collective, London, UK, May 2 - 7 2023
Within a collective feeling, inside an incessant haze, partially concealed memories, fog up an otherwise lucid state. Turning ideas through our time, as Earth rotates through space, whilst a fragmented life watches on, blindness as a shield from a forbearing fate.
Josh Alford, Andreas Behn Eschenburg, Job Boot, Ethan Caflisch, Alex Cohen, Renata Daina, Grau Del Grau, Matthias Fabre, Elizabeth Gourlay, Andrew Kernan, Sophie Lourdes Knight, Tzuhan Lin, Róisín O’Sullivan, Joshua Phillips, Mila Rae, Kit Reynolds, Alejandro Sintura, Filipa Tojal, Feiyi Wen and Linda Zagidulina
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Press
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Feiyi Wen and Xiaochi Dong bridge ancient tradition and modern ecology at Albion Jeune
art dailyJanuary 18, 2026 -
Feiyi Wen: The Garden and the Gaze
C4 JournalSarah Jitjindar , January 14, 2026 -
The Daily Guide
Country & Town HouseEllie Smith & Parm Bhamra, December 17, 2025 -
Material worlds: in conversation with artists Feiyi Wen and Xiaochi Dong
A Rabbit's FootClaire Sandford , December 11, 2025
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