Bio
Yuan Butler (b. China) is a visual artist and art professor based in Duluth, Georgia. She works primarily in oil on large scale canvas or wood panels. She demonstrated a strong aptitude for drawing from an early age in China, noted for her ability to observe and render subjects with speed and precision. She began studying traditional Chinese ink and wash painting with regional artists in northern China, received awards in elementary-level painting competitions, and was later sponsored by her school to pursue formal drawing training at a local art academy.
Butler earned a Bachelor of Arts in English Education, and prior to committing fully to her artistic career, she worked as a buyer at a major steel mill company. Throughout this period, she continued to maintain an active art practice, working as a freelance illustrator and producing visual materials for corporate publications and posters.
After immigrating to the United States in 2014, Butler transitioned fully into her artistic practice, drawing upon her strengths in both language and visual art to teach in studio art programs across the U.S. She later earned an MFA in Painting from Savannah College of Art and Design.
Her work has been exhibited widely throughout the United States and is held in both private and public collections. In 2023, Butler received the Cecile Adler Cliffer Memorial Cutting Edge Award from the National Association of Women Artists. In 2024, her work was featured in New American Paintings, MFA Issue 171. In 2025, her four-painting series Four Seasons was acquired into the permanent collection of the SCAD Museum of Art.
Artist Statement
My paintings are informed by memory, inner experience, and the slow accumulation of time. For many years, I learned to hold emotion internally, allowing unspoken moments to settle within the body and later emerge through color, form, and spatial organization. Painting functions not as a representation of the external world, but as a method of return—toward experiences that persist despite being overlooked, withheld, or softened by time and space.
Migration and shifting identities have played a central role in shaping my practice. Through repeated cycles of displacement and reorientation, I have experienced both fragmentation and renewal. As a result, art-making has become a means of gathering disparate elements, restoring continuity through sustained attention, care, and presence.
My visual language draws from both Eastern and Western artistic traditions. Early engagement with Chinese landscape painting introduced me to spatial philosophies in which restraint and openness generate meaning. Rather than relying on descriptive detail, areas of reduced articulation function as active spatial forces, shaping rhythm, breath, and emotional resonance. In dialogue with this approach, Western painting’s emphasis on layering and light allows emotional content to gradually surface through material accumulation. These influences coexist in productive tension, creating compositions in which silence and intensity operate simultaneously.
Early life experiences heightened my awareness of the coexistence of wonder and vulnerability, and of the ways natural environments mirror emotional fragility. These experiences continue to inform my use of soft structural forms, translucent layers, and subtly shifting spatial relationships. Rather than constructing fixed narratives, my paintings sustain emotional states—positioned between attraction and resistance, stillness and movement. Recurrent spatial configurations operate as thresholds, offering viewers a sense of transition rather than resolution.
My process is deliberately slow and iterative. Each work begins without a predetermined subject and develops through cycles of layering, pause, and repetition. Ambiguity is treated not as a problem to be resolved, but as a condition to be preserved. The resulting paintings remain open-ended, inviting reflection, sustained looking, and interpretive engagement.
Public Collection
"Four Seasons", Permanent Collection, Savannah Collage of Art and Design
Publications
Create! Magazine 2025
New American Paintings MFA issue 171 2024
Like Your Work Podcast 2023
Visionary Art Collective 2022
Solo Exhibitions
2025 Liminal Space, Mason Fine Art, Atlanta, GA
2023 Diamagnetic Suspension, Mason Fine Art, Atlanta, Ga
2023 Digital Screen show, SCAD Atlanta, GA
Recent Group Exhibitions
2026 Warnes Contemporary, New York, NY
2026 New South 7, KaiLin Art, Atlanta, GA
2025 Fine Art Showcase, Savannah College of Art and Design, GA
2025 Of Land and Longing, Create!Magazine, New York, NY
2025 Pin-up show, MOCA Georgia, Atlanta, GA
2025 Honeycomb, The Pollinator Art Space, Atlanta
2025 Art Spectacles Auction, Hudgens Center for Art and Learning, Duluth, GA
2025 Invitational work show, Spruil Gallery, Dunwoody, GA
2024 Honeycomb, The Pollinator Art Space, Atlanta
2024 In the Beginning, Quinlan Arts Center Gainsvelle,, GA
2024 One Art Space, New York, NY
2023 "Rise & Thrive", Asian Pacific Heritage Month, Coca Cola Headquarter, Atlanta, GA
2023 Solo digital screen show, SCAD, Atlanta
2022 Group show "Voice of Silence" curated by H Foundation
2022 Solo exhibition "Diamagnetic Suspension", Mason Fine Art, Atlanta, GA
2021 "Forbidden Fruit", Piano Craft Gallery, Boston, MA