Location: Bay Area, CA
Medium: Painting, Sculpture
Website: livienyin.com
Livien Yin (b. 1990, Boston, MA) is a Chinese-American painter and sculptor based in the Bay Area. They received their MFA in Art Practice from Stanford University in 2019 and their BA in Studio Art from Reed College. Early in their career, Yin held a Graduate Fellowship at the Headlands Center for the Arts (2019–2020) and received the 2019 American Austrian Foundation Seebacher Prize for Fine Arts, the 2019 Anita Squires Fowler Memorial Award in Photography, and the 2018 SOMArts Murphy and Cadogan Contemporary Art Award.
Yin’s first solo museum exhibition, Thirsty, was presented at the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University from August 2024 to February 2025. Their work is held in the permanent collections of the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University, the New-York Historical Society, the Imina Paula Museum in Brazil, and ICA Miami. In 2026, Yin was named a finalist for SFMOMA’s SECA Art Award, which recognizes emerging Bay Area artists.
Yin has completed residencies at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Denniston Hill, Shandaken Projects, Silver Art Projects, and the Headlands Center for the Arts.
Yin works primarily in oil on linen and canvas, creating figurative paintings that blend archival research with imaginative reconstruction. Their signature Paper Suns series takes its name from the Chinese “paper sons and daughters” — individuals who entered the United States during the Chinese Exclusion Act era (1882–1943) using forged citizenship documents. Yin uses the gaps in historical archives as fertile ground, casting friends as models to stand in for historical figures and collapsing the distance between past and present.
The paintings are characterized by thick, gestural impasto, ribbons of warm color — oranges, blues, tangerines, pinks — and a dreamlike psychological depth. Yin’s approach weaves together personal and intergenerational stories, depicting scenes of leisure, intimacy, and resistance among Asian American women and their communities across time. In more recent work, Yin has turned toward contemporary subjects, exploring friendship, displacement, and the ongoing negotiation of identity within the diaspora.
This entry was written by the Bay Area Artist Wiki project and is based on publicly available information.
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