Yan Bing

Yan Bing was born in 1980 in Tianshui, a city in Gansu Province in northwestern China. He graduated in 2007 from the Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA) in Beijing, in the third studio of the Oil Painting Department. He lives and works in Beijing.

His practice centers on ordinary, often primitive, rural materials, potatoes, mushrooms, pear blossoms, and other objects tied to agricultural labor, which he treats as both subject and material in paintings that his galleries describe as probing the "spiritual dimension" of everyday, working-class life. The approach is rooted in his own background as the son of farmers in Gansu.

His institutional exhibition history began with a solo show, Temperature, at UCCA Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing in 2009, followed by 51 sqm 14# at Taikang Space, Beijing, in 2010, and further solo presentations at Gallery Yang in Beijing across the following years. A 2016 solo exhibition at the Shanghai Minsheng Art Museum and a 2019 solo show at ShanghART's Beijing space extended his institutional and commercial profile. More recently, he had solo exhibitions at ShanghART Shanghai in 2021, at the Guangdong Museum of Art in Guangzhou and at Shanghai's START Museum in 2022, and again at START Museum in 2024. His work is held in the collections of the Taikang Art Museum in Beijing, the Shanghai Minsheng Art Museum, and the White Rabbit Contemporary Chinese Art Collection in Sydney.

Readers should note that the name Yan Bing is shared by other, unrelated figures, including a Chinese media personality and folk singer born the same year in a different province, and a nineteenth-century painter catalogued separately by auction houses. The same contemporary artist also appears under the inverted, family-name-first form Bing Yan in some auction databases. This profile concerns only the contemporary painter born in 1980 in Tianshui, Gansu, who is represented by ShanghART and Beijing Commune.

Independent critic commentary on Yan Bing in major outlets could not be confirmed in verbatim form, so no direct quotations are reproduced here. His representing galleries, ShanghART and Beijing Commune, consistently frame his work as using ordinary or primitive rural materials to probe a spiritual dimension within everyday, working-class experience, a description echoed in market summaries that trace his imagery to an early life spent among farming communities in Gansu. His steady progression through major Chinese institutions, UCCA, Taikang Space, the Shanghai Minsheng Art Museum, the Guangdong Museum of Art, and Shanghai's START Museum, indicates sustained curatorial interest inside China, even where English-language critical writing remains limited.

The highest documented auction price for Yan Bing's work is USD 498,025, reported by MutualArt as the maximum realized price for a painting. The specific work, auction house, sale location, and exact sale date behind that figure are not disclosed in accessible market-data summaries and could not be independently confirmed as of 2026-07-11. His work does appear regularly enough at auction to have a visible secondary market, but the public price record is comparatively sparse, and no reliable, independently confirmed auction-record trend line or repeat-sale data could be established from available sources.

There is no catalogue raisonne for Yan Bing, and no certificate-of-authenticity program has been documented; verification runs through his representing galleries, ShanghART and Beijing Commune. His auction history is thin relative to more established artists, so any single sale result, including his current auction high, should be read as an early data point rather than a stable trend. Because the name Yan Bing is shared with unrelated figures in other fields and periods, and because the same artist is also catalogued as Bing Yan in some auction databases, collectors and researchers should confirm that any provenance, exhibition history, or sale record specifically traces to the CAFA-trained painter born in 1980 in Tianshui, Gansu.