Yiwei Xu 许一苇 (b. 1990, Jiangsu, China) is a Chinese-born, London based artist. After finishing the Drawing Year at Royal Drawing School in 2021, Yiwei started her practice journey from doing observational drawings with mixed-media. Her artworks are rooted from natural forms which she finds in city gardens, river sides, canals, lakes and community green fields - places where people can escape easily from the hustle and bustle.

Yiwei has two studios, one of them is the outdoors. Getting outside is very healing and triggers other sensations like hearing, touching, smelling, sense of time and space, etc. She enjoys the process of her mindset being connected and reformed by these conditions. She admires and appreciates the unsettling nature, and celebrates the non-stop variation and movements which constantly show off the energy of life by breaking and reshaping. A canal's surface reflects everything in reality, but the reflection of what is real can be interrupted so easily just because of a moving boat, a blowing breeze and a floating leaf. At this moment, ripples weave together, break the stillness of water, and generate a new form of imagery.

The concept of breaking and reshaping gives the artist an open-mind and affects the way of making artworks. The honest and genuine respect for what Yiwei sees, feels and imagines has been linked up and translated as an imagery of abstraction, which allows a freedom of breaking rules and lets the answer open between likeness and inscrutability.