Rose petal, 2020
Xu Yang transforms her own body through costume, performance, and painting to explore how gender and beauty are constructed. Drawing from art history and pop culture, her work confronts the gaze, interrogates identity, and reclaims power through lush, theatrical self-portraits.
Xu Yang (b. 1996, Shandong) is a Chinese multidisciplinary artist living and working in London. Her practice spans painting, performance, and photography, and probes themes of identity, sexuality, femininity, and cultural heritage. Yang’s work merges personal narrative with historical and mythological references, creating elaborate staged worlds that confront and reconfigure the traditional male gaze.
Born under China’s one-child policy, Yang developed a strong sense of individuality early on. While rooted in the visual language of 17th- and 18th-century European painting—especially the Rococo period—she also draws from drag performance, cabaret, theatre, and contemporary pop culture. Often using her own image as a model, she transforms her appearance with silicone breasts, corsets, wigs, hip pads, and make-up, interrogating the construction of the “ideal” female figure and challenging the body-shaming culture of digital media.
Yang employs traditional oil painting techniques inspired by historical masters such as Artemisia Gentileschi and Rembrandt, recontextualising them to address contemporary questions of gender, race, and power. Through her work, she asks: What is gender identity? What is femininity? What is a mask? What is objectifying? How are we socially constructed? Her practice positions the self as both subject and surface, reimagining myth and history through a queer, feminist lens.
Yang holds an MA in Painting from the Royal College of Art (2020) and a BA in Fine Art Painting from Wimbledon College of Arts, UAL (2018). Her work has been exhibited internationally, with recent solo shows including Daughter, Sister, Mother, Monster (Berntson Bhattacharjee Gallery, London, 2024), Imagine Yourself a Warrior (Mou Projects, Hong Kong, 2023), and Therefore I Am (Dio Horia, Athens, 2022). She has taken part in major group exhibitions such as Supercrowds / Supercommunity (Tank Shanghai, 2024), Beyond the Looking Glass (galerie lange + pult, Zürich, 2024), The Cult of Beauty (Wellcome Collection, London, 2023), and Machines of Desire (Simon Lee Gallery, London, 2022).
Her work has been widely covered by international media including The Financial Times, Dazed, The Sunday Times, British Vogue, Apollo Magazine, and Artnet, and featured in the books Artists (Trolley Books / Guts Gallery, 2023) and ARTE QUEER (Rizzoli / Mondadori Electa, 2023). Yang was the winner of the Barbican Arts Group Trust ArtWorks Open (2019) and has been shortlisted for the Contemporary Young Artist Prize (2020) and the Herbert Smith Freehills Kramer Portrait Award at the National Portrait Gallery (2025). She has also been commissioned by Tate Collective (2023) and has held residencies at The Chalet (Switzerland), Vannucci (Italy), and Dio Horia (Greece).