Yingmei Duan was born in 27.10.1969 in Daqing in China. She is currently based in Braunschweig, Germany.

Yingmei Duan is part of the Chinese avant-garde, working creatively for many years living in the legendary art district of Beijing’s East Village. In 1995 she participated in the performance “To Add One Meter to an Anonymous Mountain” which is considered to be one of the classics of Chinese contemporary art.

Being based in the East Village between 1993-1995 prompted her curiosity, which led to her interest in performance art and has had a great impact on her later art career. The final turning point came when she began to study in Germany at The Braunschweig University of Art (HBK) in 2000, where she got to meet the performance artist Marina Abramović. Since that time, Yingmei Duan has dedicated herself to performance art as her artistic expression. There, she also studied and worked with the filmmaker Birgit Hein and action artist Christoph Schlingensief, participating in several of his large-scale video performance installations.

Over the past 25 years, Yingmei Duan has consistently focused on interaction and collaboration within her performance art practice.

Within her performances she crosses mediums and often incorporates sound, video and installation. She often spontaneously develops performances as situational experiments. On the other hand she can also plan her performances with intense attention being paid to the last detail.

Besides her solo projects Yingmei loves to work with people from different cultures, ages and areas of life and has realised over one hundred collaborative performance projects. Her artworks, frequently in progress, can stretch over long periods of time.

Yingmei Duan has developed her own performance system. She describes these categories as: “Solo Performance”, “Performance Installation”, “Changing Exhibitions“, “Daily Live Art Performance” (DLAP), “Equal Collaborative Performance” (ECP), “Object Interactive Performance“ (OIP), “Object & Video Interactive Performance“（OVIP) and Sound & Music Performance.

Yingmei Duan’s individual performance practice takes the body as its central medium and is dedicated to the ongoing exploration of the language of performance art, unfolding through experimental practices across diverse spatial contexts.

Her individual and collaborative performance works span a wide range of fields. In her collaborative projects, people remain at the core of the work; she has long focused on how individuals and groups articulate identity, experience, emotion, memory, thought, and consciousness, and on how these experiences are shaped by and situated within political, social, historical, and cultural contexts, forming the basis for sustained and in-depth artistic collaboration.

Taken as a whole, her performance practice embodies an open and inclusive research-oriented approach.

Yingmei Duan has made her name in numerous national and international exhibitions through her performance art, festivals, residencies, lectures and workshops through her remarkable and emotional performance art. Her work has been shown in, amongst other places the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam (2005), La Biennale di Venezia in Italy (2007), Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Germany (2009), Guangzhou Live in China (2010), Lilith Performance Studio in Sweden (2011), Hayward Gallery in London (2012), Glynn Vivian Art Gallery in Swansea in Wales (2013), He Xiangning Art Museum in China (2014), The 19th Biennale of Sydney in Australia (2014), Solyanka State Gallery in Moscow (2015), Wiener Festwoche in Austria (2016), Capsule Shanghai in China (2017), M Plus Museum Hong Kong in China (2018), Dimensions Art Center in Chongqing, China (2019), Jupiter Museum of Art in Shenzhen, China (2020) and Garage Museum of Contemporary Art in Moscow, Russia (2021-2022).