Ye Qian
Mentee: Raphael Sbrzesny
Ye Qian (*1991) lives and works in Cologne. She studied Painting at the State Academy of Fine Arts Karlsruhe, where she completed her diploma in 2024 and became a Meisterschülerin of Magnus Plessen in 2025.
Ye Qian's paintings unfold within surreal pictorial spaces in which space, place and atmosphere resist fixed definition. Beginning with unsettling, often melancholic scenes, she explores how motifs drawn from consumer culture and everyday life transform into exaggerated landscapes. Within these imagined worlds, familiarity and estrangement, proximity and distance, longing and emptiness coexist. Familiar motifs appear in unstable constellations and occasionally tip into the absurd. Her paintings thus generate a distinctive tension between atmosphere, materiality and a subtle, dark humour.
Her work has been exhibited in Germany and Switzerland, including at SALTS in Basel and Schauwerk Sindelfingen.
www.yeqian.de