Mei Yu

Mei Yu - Digital Painter

*Artist Statement*

My digital drawings begin with a feeling rather than an intention.
I am drawn to fleeting yet precious moments—a shifting shadow on a wall, the last light at dusk, reflections moving across water, or the quiet atmosphere that lingers after an experience has passed. What remains is my attempt to translate those emotional memories into form, composition, and color.
My work is an open invitation to pause, to slow down, and to embrace ambiguity.

Boston, MA, USA

About the Artist

I started training in classical Chinese painting when I was 13 and was lucky to meet and study under two great Chinese masters, 黄永玉(Huang Yongyu) and 叶浅于(Ye Qianyu). My early years of training combined Chinese traditional painting techniques with western style still life drawings, figure drawing and water color. After graduating college, I worked in a publishing company in Beijing as an art editor worked on book jacket design and illustration. I left the publishing company after a few years and moved to the US to study computer science. After earning a Masters degree, I have been working in the software engineering field ever since.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, I picked up the digital brush and returned to art again. Living in the east coast in US, am inspired every day by the mystery and shifting beauty of nature all around me, depicting a specific landscape or place, my work explores the space between observation and memory. Years of traditional Chinese painting study taught me to look for balance, rhythm, and the weight of empty space. Software engineering came later and reshaped how I see—through structure, systems, and the logic beneath things. My practice lives somewhere between the two, where intuition and structure feel less like opposites but more like the same question asked in different ways.

Primarily working with Procreate, I loved it’s “painting brushes” library, and I especially love the quality of “old brush” which I use it often, it can create the real oil paint brush’s marks and texture. Building up my work through layers, it gives me the flexibility to modify, delete or hide the layers for rework until I am happy with the result.

Since returning to art, I have created over 400 digital paintings - check them out from my instagram link.
My digital drawings are limited-edition and printed on museum-quality paper.

I am currently seeking commission works, creative collaborations and gallery representation.