Yirui Fang | Artists in Residence

Yirui Fang

Fang Yirui (b. 1997) is a Chinese artist and an assistant professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Venice, where he also earned his Master’s degree in Painting. His practice spans painting, multimedia, and installation, with a current focus on painting.
Fang’s work bridges Eastern and Western artistic traditions, merging the epic narratives of Greek mythology with the atmospheric sensibility of Chinese painting. Through themes such as divine punishment, ecological collapse, and human fragility, his work reflects on the complex relationship between humanity and nature. His figures often appear blurred or obscured, evoking twilight as a metaphor for beauty that conceals imminent danger.
His work has been exhibited internationally in Italy, China, Russia, the United Arab Emirates, North Macedonia, Slovenia, the United Kingdom, the United States, among others. Notable exhibitions include Triangle Gallery (Moscow, 2024 and 2025), Hurst Contemporary (United Kingdom, 2025), Tara Downs Gallery, and Boccanera Gallery.

20.11.-09.12.2025.

During his residency at Kamov, the artist will expand his ongoing collective project “What Are We? What Will We Become?”, developed in collaboration with artist and colleague Keren Liang. The project uses specific metaphors to express concerns about a series of problematic yet widely accepted social phenomena. For example, the changing color of the sea is influenced by nuclear wastewater, while in the language of art, abandoned, transformed, and intertwined staircases can become symbols of war, earthquakes, human impact, and the overwhelming forces of a turbulent natural world.
The project will also partially seek to reveal and interpret the idea of rationality in the sense of recognizing the need for different communities to be present within every society, while at the same time expressing the artists’ ideas and visions of our shared future space of survival.
During his residency in Rijeka, the artist will aim to question, reflect on, and gradually shape his personal position within society, as well as the potential each of us has to influence it in a positive way.