Walter Yu
Painting
Walter Yu (b. 1989, Beijing) is an artist who lives and works between Berlin and Beijing. He studied German Studies at Beijing Foreign Studies University and later trained in Fine Arts at the Berlin University of the Arts (UdK), where he became a Meisterschüler of Professor Valérie Favre.
His practice moves across painting and ceramics, often engaging with questions of perception, landscape, and spatial experience. His work reflects a sustained interest in how visual structures are shaped by memory, cultural context, and shifting viewpoints. He has presented numerous solo and group exhibitions internationally, with a strong presence in Germany and China, and has participated in various institutional exhibitions, residencies, and scholarship programs.
He has received several awards and grants, including the Award of Young Art in Berlin (2019), the Walther Stöhrer Award for Graphic Art (2015), and residencies in Germany, Greece, and China.
Statement
My work moves between painting and ceramics and is shaped by an ongoing interest in perception, landscape, and spatial experience. I explore how images are constructed through shifting viewpoints, memory, and cultural context, often allowing places, forms, and visual impressions to overlap and transform.
Landscape plays a central role in my practice, not as a fixed motif but as a mutable structure. I am interested in how landscapes can exist simultaneously as physical environments and mental spaces, shaped by movement, distance, and personal experience. Through repetition, fragmentation, and subtle shifts in form, my work reflects on how perception is never stable but constantly reconfigured.
Working between different cultural contexts, I consider displacement and transition as active forces within my process. Painting and ceramics allow me to navigate between surface and depth, material presence and illusion, creating spaces where images remain open, unresolved, and in motion.