Yunfei Ren (b. 1987, Wuhan, China) works across painting, installation, and photography. Drawing from the visual languages of cartography, geography, and meteorology, his practice examines migration as a process of continual transformation: how memory is deposited, how identity shifts under pressure, how history accumulates not as narrative but as residue. Through layered fields of lines, symbols, and shifting forms, Ren builds spaces where geographies collapse into one another and time behaves like sediment. Memory here is not preserved but rewritten; identity not fixed but measured against coordinates that keep shifting.
Ren earned his BA from Middlebury College and his MFA from Stanford University. His work has been exhibited at Smack Mellon, de Young Museum, FOR-SITE, and the Chinese Historical Society Museum, and written about in The Washington Post.
AS THE GROUND TURNED
2026
Acrylic, oil pastel, oil stick on canvas
60 x 40 in



BODIES OF WATER
2026
Acrylic, ink, silver foil on canvas
36 x 24 in





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