Yan Lou

Yan Lou's work explores the connections between landscape, memory, and matter. Using recycled paper, he composes simple forms—trunks, leaves, mountains, rivers, clouds—that seek not to imitate nature, but to reveal its inner echo. For him, paper is a living material, carrying stories. Recycling it is giving it a second existence, full of traces and possibilities. Water plays a central role in his practice: it allows the transformation of matter, the appearance of textures, or the birth of blurred and sensitive images. Yan Lou accepts accidents, the random, and allows the material to dialogue with his gestures. His work is part of a slow and attentive temporality, where each trace, each imprint, evokes a memory or a sensation. His installations, often monochrome, offer a space for contemplation and silence. They recount a collective and intimate memory, and question the cycles of transformation—matter, time, memory. Yan Lou thus creates an art of passage, where the ephemeral becomes a trace, where fragility regains all its poetic force, and where water always shows the way.