After receiving his Diplôme National d’Art (DNA) from the École supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Nantes Saint-Nazaire in 2022, Yi Ye graduated from the Beaux-Arts de Paris in 2025 with the jury’s highest honors.
Yi Ye’s practice takes functional spaces and the affective states that crystallize within them as its point of departure. His recent research focuses on the standardized and highly rational environment of the office, which he approaches as a site of melancholy intrinsic to contemporary structures of work. Within this world, where action appears suspended, thoughts and emotions unfold at the margins of productive logic, revealing the tensions between rationality, solitude, and desire.
Working through sculpture and installation, Yi Ye employs materials such as stone, leather, and metal, whose sensory qualities and cultural resonances contribute to the creation of ambiguous atmospheres. Informed by literary, historical, and tragic references, his work explores how certain emotional structures persist across time and continue to inhabit contemporary spaces.
In 2026, he presented his first solo exhibition, “LONG NIGHT”, at Galerie du Crous, Paris. His work has also been featured in numerous group exhibitions, including at Basel Social Club (“Office”, 2026), Levant Art, Shanghai (“Bird Chirp Remover”, 2026), the Palais des Beaux-Arts de Paris (“Felicità”, 2025), Agence de voyages, Paris (“La Dernière Mode”, 2025), Galerie du Crous, Paris (“Entre sans sonner”, 2025), Beaux-Arts de Paris (“Crush”, 2025), and 60 Adada, Saint-Denis (“Il n’y a pas d’infini, tout est parcelle”, 2023).