Ben Yau

Ben Yau (b. 1992, Glasgow) is a Chinese-Scots visual artist based in The Hague, NL. He graduated from the MA Photography & Society at the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague in 2023 and from Camberwell College of Arts in Fine Art Photography in 2019, the same year being selected for Bloomberg New Contemporaries and Creekside Open.

Selected exhibitions include solo presentations In the Shadow of Ashes, The Balcony (The Hague, 2024), Proximate Currents: When Everything Fuses Together, Iniva (online/London, 2020); and group exhibitions The London Open, Whitechapel Gallery (London, 2022), Bloomberg New Contemporaries, Leeds Art Gallery, Leeds, and South London Gallery, London (2019).

His work is cultivated from historiographical research of othered narratives: the repression of certain histories and the imperial operations conducted to this end. These narratives are often omitted from official historical accounts, demanding a multi-modal approach beyond conventional institutions of history. This involves intervening, mediating, and countering the archive, utilising the generative ambiguities of artistic research. From research-led processes, he engages with a diverse range of materials, including declassified intelligence documents, archival films, and newspaper clippings.