Meng-Yu Yan 颜梦钰 is a multimedia artist whose work blends digital photography with analogue processes, sculpture, video, and installation. Informed by Daoist philosophy and a love for darkness, Yan plays “photographic games” using shadows, cuts, mirrors, glass, water, and light to conjure surreal visual dreamscapes. 

Spontaneous and experimental, their practice engages deeply with themes of self-reflection, absence, alienation, and the unconscious. A first-generation Chinese Australian queer non-binary artist, Yan explores intersections of race, culture, gender, spirituality, and sexuality through fragmented self-portraiture, echoing Surrealists like Claude Cahun and Duane Michals. Their work channels paranormal and spiritual phenomena, drawing on spirit photography, divination, performative haunting, and astrology. 

Yan’s work has featured in over forty exhibitions across Australia, China, Mexico, and France. Their debut solo show occulere – vision & concealment opened at Dominik Mersch Gallery in 2017. In 2019, they received the Ross Steele Scholarship for a residency at Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris. They completed an MFA (Research) at UNSW Art & Design in 2020. Recent highlights include their solo exhibition Double Witness (2023) at ANU’s Centre on China in the World, being a finalist in the National Photographic Portrait Prize (2023 & 2024), a finalist in the Bowness Photography Prize (2025), and Highly Commended for the Olive Cotton Award (2023). Their first international solo, The Vessel of Shadows, opens at Three Shadows Photography Art Centre, Xiamen, China in 2025. 

Contact: mengyu.yan(at)gmail.com

The artist acknowledges the Gadigal people of the Eora nation on whose land they live and work. Sovereignty was never ceded.