Jiatong Yuan is a London-based Chinese artist. She holds an MA in Painting from the Royal College of Art (2026), where she was awarded the Basil H. Alkazzi Scholarship Award, and an MA in Art & Ecology from Goldsmiths, University of London (2024). Her work has been exhibited internationally across the UK, US, Germany, and China.
Jiatong approaches painting as a living process rather than a representational image. Her work explores how matter, time, and the body interact to generate forms through material transformation. Her process begins by soaking specially prepared canvases, allowing pigment to seep into the surface and create compressed pictorial spaces. Through extended periods of absorption, penetration, and sedimentation, the canvas becomes an active participant in the work rather than support. Jiatong then responds to emerging forms through gestures shaped by rhythm, pressure, duration, and density, allowing each painting to develop without a predetermined formula.
Her practice draws on plant life, microbiological processes, and everyday experience. Her recent paintings respond to the drought of London summers and the death and transformation of plants, not as representations of a particular landscape but as encounters with changing environments. Titles are also an important entry point into her practice. The surface of the work continuously shifts between presence and disappearance, stability and uncertainty, it carries a sense of care, permeability, repair and openness. In this way, painting resembles the environments we inhabit: porous, adaptive, and constantly evolving.