Wendi Yan is a Chinese artist, writer and technologist who constructs speculative epistemologies using CGI, game engines and conceptual sculpture. Her work imagines alternative historical timelines set in the psychogeography of the East and West. In 2025 she won the Grand Prix of the 6th VH Award, organized by Hyundai Motor Group, for Dream of Walnut Palaces, a CGI film reimagining an eighteenth-century encounter between Asian and European knowledge.
Born in Beijing, Yan holds an A.B. in History of Science from Princeton University and an M.S. in Fiction and Entertainment from SCI-Arc. Her history training shapes her practice, and she approaches the history of science as a set of contested narratives rather than settled fact. She turns overlooked or misunderstood historical ideas into characters with legs, arms and heads that can move and emote. Her 2023 exhibition A Tiny Museum of Mammoth Technologies at Hurley Gallery staged a fictional science museum, borrowing the visual authority of scientific display without any actual science inside it. With the artist Karyn Nakamura, she has developed POND, a research-sharing tool that visually maps the trails of attention and connection behind a body of research. Nakamura built the first prototype in April 2025.
