WATCH: A day in the studio with Chinese painter Yan Wei

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Yan Wei is a contemporary artist and painter from Beijing, China. After graduating from Tsinghua University’s Academy of Art and Design, she started her career as an illustrator working in the advertising industry. However, during her stint in advertising, she began to question her own goals and motivations. “I had to face the fact that advertising was not the reason I got into art,” she says. “I realized that advertising would only take me further away from my goals as an artist.”

闫威是来自北京的一名当代艺术家和画家。从清华大学美术学院毕业后，她为广告公司做插画设计。但这个行业让她开始怀疑自己的选择，质疑起自己学美术的目标和初衷。“我意识到，广告不是我当初从事艺术创作的原因，并且会让我离自己成为艺术家的目标越来越远。”

Moonlight

Internal

Soon after this revelation, Yan quit her cushy advertising job and set up a painting studio in her parent’s home. She intended to dedicate all of her energy to making a reputation for herself in the art world. Over the next decade, Yan continuously progressed as an artist – her work would evolve from small ink-on-paper pieces to large-scale acrylic works on canvas.

Yan’s hard work would pay off. As of now, her work has been displayed in numerous exhibitions, received massive amounts of praise and attention online, and has been purchased by the Shanghai Art Museum for its public collection.

想清楚之后，闫威辞掉了原来收入颇丰的工作，在父母家中成立了一个画室。她打算把所有的精力投入到艺术创作中，争取在艺术界中立足。在接下来的十年里，闫威的艺术创作不断精进，作品也渐渐从一方方小画纸进军到偌大的丙烯画布上去。

功夫不负有心人。从毅然离职到重归艺术创作，再到十年如一日的创作，到目前为止，闫威的作品已经在许多展览上展出，在网络媒体上也获得了大量的点赞和关注，且不少作品已被上海美术馆收录。

Yan Wei’s creative process is centered around routine and discipline. She shares, “A lot of people might think, artists or those who work creatively might live more spontaneously and stay up late, but it’s not like that. I’ll wake up in the morning, eat breakfast, clean the house, and start to paint. Then I’ll have lunch and continue to paint, all the way until the sun goes down and it gets dark, and I can’t paint anymore.”

闫威创作流程的核心是规律和纪律。她分享道：“很多人会以为艺术家或在创意领域中工作的人，总是生活得很随性或经常熬夜，但事实不是这样。”她继续向我们描述她例行的生活：“我会起得很早，吃早餐，打扫家里，开始画画。接着我会吃午餐然后继续画画，一直到傍晚天色暗下来，我没办法再画了为止。”

Guardian

Youth, beauty, and femininity are recurring themes throughout Yan Wei’s body of work. Her art is a way for her to explore the changing roles of women within the context of modern culture and society. “I think of femininity as a whole,” she explains. “Each of my paintings, the subjects are different, but they all have something in common.”

在闫威的作品中，青春、美丽、女性气质是经常出现的主题。通过自己的作品，她在探索着现代文化和社会背景下女性角色的变化。她解释道：“我是将女性气质当作一个整体来思考的。我的每幅作品都会有不同的人物角色，但她们都有共同之处。”

Hunt

For Yan, her art has also become a process of self-discovery regarding what it means to be a woman. “When I depict women, I think it’s different than when men depict women. When men depict women, it might be as an outside observer. But when I depict women, it’s a depiction of who I am.”

对于闫威来说，艺术是一个自我发现的过程，让她探讨成为一名女性的意义。“当我画女性时，应该跟男性画家描绘女性形象是不同的。男人画女性时，可能是以外部观察者的角度来创作的。但是当我画女性的时候，其实也是在画自己。”