All People
Yinan Wang HEADSHOT

Yinan Wang

  • Lecturer, Film, Video, Animation and New Genres

Education

  • MFA, Film & Media Arts, Temple University
  • BFA, Film, UW-Milwaukee

Biography

I was born and raised in Beijing, where my filmmaking began through experimental ethnographic practices grounded in observation and immersion. After relocating to the United States, I continued this approach in Milwaukee and Philadelphia—two cities whose contrasts have deepened my sense of identity, displacement, and belonging.

My work dwells in the in-between: spaces where cultures meet, blur, and resist one another. Drawing on the playful use of everyday materials and the layering of memory and history, I turn to humor, ritual, and silence as sites of meaning.

Through moving images, I trace how memory, language, and food shape our sense of home, following the shifting contours of cultural identity formed as much by migration as by longing.

My recent work, Thick & Sweet, revisits Yen Ching, a beloved Chinese restaurant in Milwaukee that operated for over forty years before its demolition. Composed of cutouts, reenactments, found footage, and fragments of earlier films, the piece reconstructs personal and collective memory while probing stereotypes within Asian American representation.

I am currently developing three projects: a portrait of a Chinese laundry in Milwaukee’s Bronzeville; a return to Beijing after a decade away; and Bing Cherry, which centers on Ah Bing, who cultivated the Bing cherry in 1875 in Milwaukie but was barred from reentering the United States after visiting China. For Bing Cherry, I am experimenting with phytogram techniques to explore how material processes can shape moving images.

Links

Recent Work

Image of film phytogram of Bing cherry leaves, showing internal structures
A phytogram of three Bing cherry leaves, collected from an old Bing cherry tree in an orchard in Wisconsin
The uprooted, the American dreams, the thick and sweet sauce, and an empty dining hall—too much for one to face and survive. It is far easier to demolish a closed restaurant. Composed of cutouts, reenactments, found footage, and fragments of earlier films, the work attempts to rebuild personal and collective memory while probing the flattened representations of Asian American portrayals.