Yan Zhancheng was born in Yan'an, China, in 1984, graduated from the Xi'an Academy of Fine Arts Oil Painting Department in 2008, and currently lives and works in Beijing. 

From 2017, Yan began to incorporate his personal interpretation of the poetry of Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867) and other Western literary novels and articles in his artworks. Incessantly, he pursues an inner sentimentality amidst an unsettling external environment of constant shift, an opposition of which lends his works a sense of poetry depicted in the literary works he admires. In Yan’s works, figurative landscapes and blurred physiognomies constitute his compositions, in which repeatedly modified and stacked paint blocks and the fluid contours delineated by markers forge a confrontation between thickness and lightness. In recent years, Yan Zhancheng’s artistic creation has gradually gravitated toward literature after transitioning from an attempt to depict randomness. By finding his painterly style and artistic language, Yan has become more confident in depicting “the things he wants to paint.”

Yan Zhancheng's selected solo exhibitions include: Square Hart (Author Gallery, Beijing, 2022), The Big Rock (BENFUN Gallery, Taiwan, 2021), A Step Closer to Water (Author Gallery, Beijing, 2019). Selected group exhibitions include: Perceptual alternating·One look at the Possibility of Autumn (JH Gallery, Shanghai, 2021), Time Party (MOFEIMO Gallery, Qingdao, 2020), Group Exhibition of Contemporary Portraiture (Red Gate Gallery, Beijing, 2019).