For her first solo exhibition in China, British artist Michaela Yearwood-Dan presents RECESS, a new body of work that unfolds through gesture, rhythm, and reflection. The title suggests both a pause and a space—a moment of withdrawal that allows for renewal and a physical depth carved into surface and time.
In RECESS, painting becomes a state of breath. Yearwood-Dan tilts, pours, and layers pigment directly onto canvas stretched across vast frames, and onto voile for smaller, more intimate works, allowing colour to flow and settle like water seeking form. These gestures—at once deliberate and instinctive—evoke the fluidity and discipline found in traditional Chinese calligraphy and movement practices such as Tai Chi, where stillness and motion coexist in harmony.
Michaela Yearwood-Dan, We were girls together, 2025, oil, ceramic petals and glass beads on canvas, 220 x 300 cm. Courtesy of the artist, Hauser & Wirth and Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York and Aspen. Photo: Deniz Guzel
The artist describes her process as “a dance with the canvas,” a choreography guided by gravity, intuition, and emotion. Her palette—golds, reds, jade greens, blacks, and deep blues—carries symbolic echoes of Chinese culture yet remains filtered through her personal, global vocabulary. Yearwood-Dan reflects here on interconnectedness. As a Black British artist working within the lineage of Western abstraction, she enters into dialogue with Chinese visual tradition through resonance rather than imitation: “It’s about how certain colours and gestures already live in our collective imagination.”
The artist intuitively references theories of Ying and Yang and the Five elements (Wood, Fire, Earth, Metal, and Water)—cornerstones of Chinese metaphysics. The Wu Xing cycle illustrates how each element gives birth to the next: Wood fuels Fire, Fire creates Earth, Earth generates Metal, Metal purifies Water, and Water nourishes Wood—organically shaping the aesthetics of life’s cyclical balance that echo through her compositions.
The word RECESS also gestures inwards: towards introspection, softness, and the private spaces within an artist’s practice. For Yearwood-Dan, the exhibition marks a moment of much needed lightness and playfulness—a pause between projects, a breath between worlds. Within this pause, she explores how cultural memory, perception, and embodied experience flow together through paint.
RECESS transforms the gallery into a contemplative environment reminiscent of a garden—a concept deeply rooted in Taoist, Confucian, and Buddhist philosophies—offering a space where colour, form, and movement invite the viewer to linger, reflect, and breathe.
About the Artist
Michaela Yearwood-Dan. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Ollie Adegboye
Michaela Yearwood-Dan (b. 1994, London) creates paintings that intertwine gesture, colour, and text in layered explorations of identity, intimacy, and joy. Working across painting, works on paper, ceramics, and site-specific installations, she builds spaces that celebrate community, abundance, and care. Her distinctive visual language draws from Blackness, queerness, femininity, healing rituals, and carnival culture, merging the personal with the collective. Botanical motifs and diaristic reflections emerge through expressive abstraction and fluid cascades of paint, balancing exuberance with vulnerability. From monumental canvases to intimate ceramics, Yearwood-Dan’s practice invokes the warmth of domestic space as a site for reflection and belonging. Rejecting fixed definitions of identity, she envisions worlds—physical, pastoral, and metaphorical—where multiplicity and fluidity coexist.
Yearwood-Dan has exhibited internationally, with her work held in the permanent collections of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Speed Art Museum, Louisville; the Nasher Museum of Art, Durham; the Dallas Museum of Art; and the Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, among others. She earned her BA from the University of Brighton in 2016 and lives and works in London.
