Bio

Yuan Butler (b. China) is a visual artist and art professor based in Duluth, Georgia. Working primarily in oil painting, she blends abstraction and figuration to examine the emotional landscapes of lived experience and the poetic distance between reality and imagination. Showing a strong interest in art from an early age, Butler received formal academic training in drawing and traditional ink and wash painting in northern China, studying for several years before beginning a traditional career as a buyer at a major steel company. After immigrating to the United States in 2014, she transitioned to a full-time artistic path and later earned her MFA in Painting from the Savannah College of Art and Design (2022).

Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including at the Coca-Cola Headquarters, Mason Fine Art, Spruill Gallery, the Hudgens Center for Art & Learning, and various academic and contemporary art venues. Butler’s paintings have been featured in New American Paintings, Create! Magazine, and Visionary Art Collective. She is the recipient of the Cecile Adler Cliffer Memorial Cutting Edge Award from the National Association of Women Artists (2023).

In addition to her studio practice, Butler teaches part-time at Georgia Gwinnett College, where she integrates experiential learning and collaborative inquiry into her curriculum. Her current work continues to investigate the interplay between personal history, liminality, and the expressive capacities of color and form.

Statement

When I think back to my earliest memories, I return to a mountainous region in northern China where my family once lived. The mountains were alive with light — slopes folding into mist, streams whispering through stones. Among these impressions, one moment stands apart: a childhood afternoon when I encountered a snake while playing with other girls in the hills. I was the last in line, and as the serpent crawling down from the hill, my friends scattered in panic. I followed, terrified yet oddly aware of the beauty in that sudden movement — the shimmer of its scales, the curve of its body disappearing into the wild.

That experience has lingered as an early lesson in contradiction — how wonder and fear can coexist, how the natural world mirrors the fragility of human emotion. Over time, this memory evolved into a visual language in my paintings: shifting forms, translucent layers, and a dialogue between attraction and repulsion.

My painting practice centers on the transformation of instinctive mark-making into visual environments that mediate between abstraction and figuration. Each work begins with automatic drawings informed by natural rhythms, which serve as structural catalysts for layered oil compositions. Through this process, organic gestures evolve into spatially ambiguous terrains that resist fixed interpretation.

While the formal development is intuitive, the psychological impetus is deeply rooted in lived experience. Themes of migration, memory, and interior turbulence surface through fragmented architectures, fluctuating silhouettes, and unexpected chromatic tensions. These elements operate as metaphoric sites where emotional states intersect with shifting physical and cultural landscapes.

Influences from Early Baroque light, Rococo ornamentation, and women modernist artists, have contributed to my investigation of symbolic forms within a reflective space—one that enables the reimagining of identity and the articulation of the porous boundaries between reality and imagination.