“Living away from home changed the way I look at home, but it also changed the way I look at myself,” says Xinan Yang. The London-based painter has spent much of her recent work exploring what happens to our idea of home once it stops being one fixed place.
In her latest exhibition, The First Letter Home in Spring, Yang’s subjects sit in their bedrooms, faces lit by laptops and phones, reaching for family and friends across distance. Her paintings dwell in the strange space between solitude and connection — screens collapse distance even as they remind us how far away someone really is. “Phones and screens have become part of how we maintain relationships, especially across long distances,” Yang says. “They allow someone who is physically absent to remain present in our lives in another way.” But presence isn’t the same as proximity, and her work returns again and again to a single idea: connection and loneliness can coexist.
Yang left Shanghai for London at twenty-four, and has been renegotiating her relationship with home ever since. “Home has become something I have had to keep imagining and reconstructing, rather than something stable I could simply return to,” she says. “Distance has also made me more aware of small details I might not have noticed when I was actually living there — certain rooms, objects, family photographs, ordinary moments. These fragments gradually became ways for me to think about memory, belonging, and how identity shifts when you live away from where you come from.” It isn’t the dramatic memory that sharpens in Yang’s work, but the mundane one — details once invisible in the background of daily life now catch the light from a distance.
These fragments recur throughout The First Letter Home in Spring, where quiet domestic drama unfolds in beds sometimes occupied, sometimes empty. The bed itself is a loaded image, and its recurring, central presence lends the work an unsettling intimacy — even a sense of trespass. That feeling is sharpened by the objects scattered through each scene, details rarely granted space in traditional painting: a towel left on the bed, sheets crumpled to reveal the bare mattress beneath.
Since completing her doctorate, Yang says she has grown increasingly drawn to these physical traces of domestic life. “Things like a bed, a chair, a pair of shoes, or objects left in a room can carry traces of someone’s presence and everyday life.” In The Letter Unsent, the objects are deliberately ordinary — that’s the point. “Even when the person is absent, these objects can suggest their presence, their habits, or something that has just taken place,” she says. The same holds for an empty room: “Someone may have left, but the space and the objects still retain traces of them.”
Yang’s paintings typically begin with found photographs — some from her own life, others from family, friends, or social media. “I’m usually drawn to moments that seem very ordinary but evoke a particular emotion or association for me,” she says.
Social media plays a distinct role in this process. Yang is fascinated by how much information hides in seemingly throwaway photographs, and how people use those images to construct a version of themselves. “Social media has become one of the ways we look at other people, but also how we look at ourselves,” she says. “Our digital identities are constantly changing and being reshaped through what we choose to share online.”
That reliance on social media adds a further layer of distortion: the source images have already been altered — cropped, posed, filtered, partially shared — long before Yang ever sees them. Her process starts by stripping details from these found images, then rebuilding them partly from memory, letting the original photograph dissolve. “It is no longer simply a record of the original image,” she says. “It becomes an image that has been reworked through memory and imagination.” What emerges is a portrait of a stranger who somehow feels eerily familiar.
Animals recur throughout Yang’s work too, reinforcing a very post-pandemic reality in which people lean heavily on screens — and on their pets — for companionship. The dog that appears often belongs to Yang’s own family; the birds that thread through her paintings first arrived as symbols of “migration, movement and leaving.” They’ve stayed with her ever since. “Over time, they became a more personal symbol within my paintings,” she says. “They can represent both departure and the search for a path back.”
Words by Juliet Wood.
