Biography

Jingwen Yao (b. 1990, Beijing) is a Berlin-based multidisciplinary artist working across painting, installation, and research-driven projects. Her practice explores relationships between ecology, migration, and belonging through material experimentation and socially engaged processes.

Trained in both visual art and product design, Yao holds a master’s degree from Delft University of Technology. She has lived and worked across Asia, Europe, and Africa, experiences that continue to inform her artistic practice.

Since relocating to Berlin in 2021, her work has been presented in various project spaces and galleries across Germany. In 2025, she was awarded the HVB KunstCUBEs artist grant, a year-long public exhibition program supported by UniCredit, and was selected for the IN//Between Residency funded by the Berliner Landeszentrale für politische Bildung. In 2023, her painting was featured in Der Tagesspiegel for her participation in the exhibition Contemporary Positions on Portraiture.

She has also realized site-responsive projects in public space, including an installation in Park am Nordbahnhof funded by Bezirksamt Mitte von Berlin.

“ My practice moves between painting, installation, and research-based projects that explore how we shape and are shaped by the environment and societies we inhabit. Having lived and worked across different cultural contexts, I am intrigued to ask how we leave traces on landscapes, communities, and each other, and how these traces come to define who we are and where we belong.

I use mixed media, choosing materials intuitively to align with each project’s concept, whether wood, textiles, found objects, or paints. My background in product design trained me to think through making: prototyping, testing, and responding to physical properties. This openness allows me to experiment and answer honestly to each theme.

Many of my works connect ecological systems with social narratives. I have created urban habitats for pollinators, mapped the migration routes of vegetables as reflections on human mobility, and collaborated with people experiencing homelessness to bring forward stories that often remain overlooked.

Through these projects, I explore how relationships between humans, non-human life, and place might be reconsidered and reimagined.”