Fan Xiaoyan was born in 1983 in Gaomi, China. In 2008 she graduated from the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, where she continues to live and work. Through the combination of soft, warm flesh against cold, hard steel, Xiaoyan constructs a jarring contrast that engages her viewers on a visual and psychological level, explaining that her metal-infused figurative sculptures are reflective of a "surrealistic virtual world in which men and women are equal... the arrival of a new era, a new kind of human being, a new power, a sensation..."