Cong Yu
2025
2023 - 2024
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Born 1998 in Nanjing, China
Yu’s practice explores the entanglement of body, landscape, and memory, tracing how personal displacement and broader histories shape the way we inhabit place. Working primarily in large-scale painting, she often begins with intimate image of the female body, which gradually expands into vast landscapes where body and terrain coexist. This codependency between human and nature—where the bodies form or become land, and the land bears the body’s presence—anchors much of her work.
Drawing from her experience of constructing and negotiating identity across cultures, Yu approaches painting as both a refuge and a confrontation. Her imagery often carries residues of dislocation: ruins, outback encampments, and improvised architectures or vehicles of survival. These incomplete forms of “home” speak to both fragility and resilience, echoing her own negotiation of belonging across cultural and geographic borders.
Recent works developed during the Broken Hill Art Exchange 2025 Spring Artist Residency Program, supported by Create NSW, respond to the Australian desert environment while also extending her research into contemporary narrations of Australia’s cultural identity. This ongoing body of work situates her practice within a dialogue between civilization and nature, intimacy and distance, home and estrangement.
Yu holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in Art History from the University of Sydney. She currently lives and works in Shanghai, China.