Yinan
Wang

Yinan Wang was born and raised in Beijing, where his filmmaking began through experimental ethnographic work grounded in observation and immersion. After relocating to the United States, he continued this practice in Milwaukee and Philadelphia—two cities whose contrasts deepened his sense of identity, displacement, and belonging.

His work moves through the in-between, where cultures meet, blur, and resist one another. He turns to humor, rituals, and silences as quiet sites of meaning. Through moving images, Wang traces how memory, language, and food shape our sense of home, following the shifting contours of cultural identity shaped as much by migration as by longing.

Composed of cutouts, reenactments, found footage, and fragments of earlier films, his recent work Thick & Sweet 甜腻腻 rebuilds personal and collective memory while probing the flattened portrayals of Asian American representation. Across these works, Wang seeks stories that unfold beyond traditional narratives—centering labor, craft, and materiality, and weaving them with personal history to form an emotional ethnography of the immigrant experience.