Xing Danwen, born in Xi’an, China, currently lives and works in Beijing. She received a BFA from the Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing, China in 1992, and completed her MFA from the School of Visual Arts, New York in 2001.
    With a background in painting, Xing Danwen began exploring the medium of photography in the end of the 1980s, and has since pursued video art and tested its boundary. In recent years, her works embarks with the usage of objects and material, blurring its boundaries and space structures, and shifting amid multi-element installations freely. In the nearly thirty years of artistic creation, Xing Danwen addresses issues like social formation, female identity, the impact of urbanization on individuals and so forth, during which, the artist challenged the limit of art while realizing art diversity through comprehensive artistic languages.
Danwen's work is at the vanguard of Chinese contemporary art scene, and she remains active home and abroad. As an outstanding female photographer and a new media artist, Xing Danwen is a familiar name in academic journals and for art critics worldwide; her works are included in various international books, and have been shown in numerous art galleries and various international biennales and triennials, such as the Sydney Biennale, Yokohama Triennial, the New York Whitney Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, International Center for Photography, L.A. Getty Center, France Centre George Pompidou, London Victoria and Albert Museum, the Boijmans Museum in Rotterdam and so forth. In addition, her works have also been collected by some of the aforementioned institutions, as well as by private collections such as Uli Sigg, Swiss Bank, Foundation Nationale Art Collection. In 2017, Beijing’s Red Brick Museum held a retrospective exhibition of her. In 2018, she was awarded with the Silver trophy for the Best Artist of the Year by AAC. In the fall of 2019, the prestigious publishing house Prestel plans to publish a catalog of the artist’s work in the past 25 years.