Lin Yan was born in Beijing into a family of artists and received formal training at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing (B.F.A), at the École National Superieur des Beaux Arts in Paris, and, lastly, at Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania where she received an M.A. in 1989, and thereafter, in 1993, moved to New York. Yan refers to her work as “sculptural paintings,” resulting from a creative manipulation of handmade paper, crumpled and layered into three-dimensional constructs and enhanced with ink. She claims inspiration from the forms of traditional architecture she grew up with in Beijing and the modern, industrial, architecture of her Brooklyn home. While the materials Yan chooses are those of the traditional arts of Chinese calligraphy and painting, Yan’s creations are so thoroughly informed by abstraction that the link to China’s past becomes tenuous, a sign of almost complete metamorphosis.. Her work has been exhibited in the USA, Europe, China, Taiwan, and Australia and has been collected by the National Art Museum of China, the Chengdu Contemporary Museum, and Deutche Bank Art. Yan currently lives in Brooklyn with her husband, the painter Wei Jia.