Ye Qian's painting moves within surreal pictorial spaces, in which space, place and atmosphere resist a clear localization. Starting from unsettling, often melancholically charged scenarios, she examines how motifs from consumer culture and everyday life become exaggerated landscapes.
In these pictorial worlds, familiarity and strangeness, closeness and distance, longing and emptiness meet. Familiar motifs appear in unstable orders, change their original contexts and occasionally tip into the absurd. Much remains in suspense: what at first seems familiar develops a peculiar strangeness, while the unusual at the same time exerts a certain attraction.
Thus her works create a tension between atmosphere, materiality and a subtle dark humour. The pictures allow for different associations and perceptions without committing to a single clear narrative.
Ye Qian (*1991) lives and works in Cologne. She studied painting at the Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste Karlsruhe, where she graduated with a diploma in 2024 and was a Meisterschülerin under Magnus Plessen in 2025.