Studio grant holder in Umeå 31 August – 29 November 2021

Yingmei Duan. Born 1969 in China. Lives and works in Braunschweig, Germany.

Yingmei Duan is part of the Chinese avant-garde, working creatively for many years living in the legendary art district of Beijing’s East Village. In 1995 she participated in the performance “To Add One Meter to an Anonymous Mountain” which is considered to be one of the classics of Chinese contemporary art. Being based in the East Village between 1993-1995 prompted her curiosity, which led to her interest in performance art and has had a great impact on her later art career. The final turning point came when she began to study in Germany at The Braunschweig University of Art (HBK) in 2000, where she got to meet the performance artist Marina Abramović. Since that time Yingmei Duan has dedicated herself to performance art as her artistic expression. There, she also studied and worked with the filmmaker and action artist Christoph Schlingensief, participating in several of his large-scale video performance installations.

Photo: Yingmei Duan 2011

For the past twenty years she has concentrated her energy and creativity on making performance art and researching the medium. Within her performances she crosses mediums and often incorporates sound, video and installation. Besides her solo projects Yingmei loves to work with people from different cultures, ages and areas of life and has realised over a hundred collaborative performance projects.

She has developed her own independent performance system and describes these priorities as: “Solo Performance”, “Performance Installation”, “Daily Live Art Performance”, “Equal Collaborative Performance”, “Changing Exhibitions”, “Object Interactive Performance” and “Object & Video Interactive Performance”. In 2018, Yingmei Duan recorded a music album called “Forty-Eight Years Ago, the Road an Ocean”. It is an extension of her performance art.