The Young Artist of the Year 2025, Man Yau (b. 1991) is an artist based in Helsinki, Finland. Yau holds master’s degrees from both the Aalto University of Art and Design (MA, 2018), and the Academy of Fine Arts, University of the Arts Helsinki (MFA, 2023), specializing in material-based practice.

The premise of her artistic work is to explore the feeling of “being on display and under pressure,” a concept she approaches from the perspective of a woman and a BIPOC artist (black, indigenous, and (other) people of color). Yau works with sculptures and installations, often incorporating objects or situations recognizable from everyday surroundings. This includes appropriated aesthetics such as Chinoiserie decoration, or larger spatial structures such as monarch gardens – places where power is represented by forcing a living symmetry. Yau draws on the cultural specificity of different material textures, along with the emotions and connotations those materials evoke.

Man Yau describes her own work as follows:

I work with sculptures and installations, often imitating everyday objects and aesthetic symbols of power. Materials and the value-laden associations tied to them are central to my work. I exploit the emotions and meanings evoked by demanding materials such as clay, silk, metal and glass – for example, ceramics can refer to the culture I supposedly come from, silk to the commercialization of the exotic, and glass to fragility.

Man Yau’s work has been exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma (2025), HAM Helsinki Art Museum in Finland (2024), Boy konsthall in Sweden (2021), and 198 CAL in London (2023). Yau has worked in several residencies abroad, including China, Japan and Denmark. Her works can be found in the collections of the City of Helsinki and HAM Helsinki Art Museum, Finnish National Gallery and the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma, Finnish State Art Commission, Finnish Art Society (art lottery), as well as in the collection of the Saastamoinen Foundation in EMMA – Espoo Museum of Modern Art, Aalto University Executive Education Collection and the Shigaraki Ceramic Cultural Park Art Collection in Japan.