Yuan Fang

Yuan Fang was born in 1996 in Shenzhen, China, and now lives and works in New York. She earned a BFA in Visual and Critical Studies from the School of Visual Arts in New York in 2019, where she received the Rhodes Family Award for Outstanding Achievement, and she completed an MFA at the same school in 2022. Her paintings recur around mask and mirror imagery, most visibly in an ongoing body of work titled Expanse, and in a 2021 solo show at Hive Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing called Emptiness and Mirror.

Her exhibition record accelerated through the early 2020s: a solo show at Prince & Wooster in New York in 2022, a solo show at Half Gallery in New York in 2023, and in 2024 the solo exhibition Flux at the Long Museum (West Bund) in Shanghai, where she became the youngest artist to receive a solo museum exhibition there. That same year she was named to Forbes Asia's 30 Under 30 list in the arts category. She has since shown solo with Skarstedt in London in 2024 and in Chelsea, New York, in 2025, with the exhibition Spaying.

A note on naming: this Masterworks record was originally filed under a family-name-first variant of her name, Fang Yuanhuan. No independently documented artist matching that exact name could be found in gallery, museum, or auction records. Every source consulted, spanning her gallery biographies, museum exhibition pages, and auction results, uses the name Yuan Fang (sometimes rendered Fang Yuan), and the identity has been resolved to that artist based on consistent birth year, education, representation, and exhibition history.

Institutional recognition for Yuan Fang currently runs ahead of a developed body of independent art criticism. Museums and foundations that hold her work include the Long Museum in Shanghai, the Institute of Contemporary Art in Miami, Lafayette Anticipations in Paris, the FLAG Art Foundation in New York, the Grand Rapids Art Museum, and the Inima de Paula Museum in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, among others. Her Forbes Asia 30 Under 30 listing in 2024 is the clearest third-party recognition to date. No verbatim, attributable critic quotes from major outlets could be confirmed at the time of writing.

Yuan Fang's auction history is short, as would be expected for an artist only a few years past her MFA. Her recorded auction high is Expanse (Mask), which sold for USD 88,900 at Phillips New York on 8 March 2023. A later Phillips New York sale of a related work, Expanse (Blossoming), brought USD 63,500 on 28 February 2025, below the 2023 record. She is represented by Skarstedt, with solo shows in London and New York. Hive Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing has exhibited her work since at least 2021, though available sources describe it as an exhibition venue rather than a representing gallery.

Yuan Fang's market is thin by definition: an artist this early in her career has only a handful of public auction results, so any single sale can move the picture more than it would for an artist with decades of trading history. There is no catalogue raisonne, and provenance research should run through her primary gallery, Skarstedt, rather than relying on auction cataloguing alone. Collectors researching comparables should also account for the name variance across records, since some listings use Yuan Fang and others Fang Yuan, and confirm they are looking at the same body of work before drawing market conclusions.