Location: Oakland, CA
Medium: Painting, Drawing, Mixed Media
Website: yamengleethorp.com
Yameng Lee Thorp was born in China in the 1980s and emigrated to post-apartheid South Africa at age eleven, where she spent her formative years amid the profound social and ecological contrasts of that country. She earned a BFA from the Michaelis School of Fine Art at the University of Cape Town in 2004, followed by an associate degree in animation from the Beijing Film Academy in 2005, and an MA in Design from Domus Academy in Milan, Italy in 2011—where she received the MIND Scholarship in 2010. After completing her graduate studies she relocated to the East Bay, where she now lives and works in Oakland.
Lee Thorp has been recognized with a 2026 SFMOMA SECA Art Award finalist nomination and a 2026 Henderson Award for Artist in Residence at the Headlands Center for the Arts in Marin. She also received a Center for Cultural Innovation Grant in 2023 and held a residency at KALA Art Institute in Berkeley in 2024. Her work is held in the permanent collections of the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
She is represented by pt.2 Gallery in Oakland.
Lee Thorp works in large-scale abstract painting using oils, acrylics, watercolor, charcoal, and ink on canvas, raw linen, and paper. Informed by her grandmother’s tradition of Chinese ink painting, she employs direct mark-making and allows pigment to pool and bloom unpredictably across unprimed fabric. Her canvases hold figures that shift fluidly between human, animal, and plant forms—what she calls “speculative landscapes”—where personal mythology and political history merge into densely layered emotional terrains. The work confronts, in her words, “the psychic fallout shaped by political erasure,” drawing on her grandfather’s experiences during China’s Cultural Revolution and on her own childhood passage through post-apartheid South Africa. Natural worlds—East Bay chaparral, South African ecology—anchor these imagined spaces, and the resulting paintings hold grief and exuberance simultaneously: raw yet refined, spontaneous yet deliberate.
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