Yang Jianmo (杨简陌, pronounced “Gem-Mo”) is an interdisciplinary visual artist integrating spatial thinking with emotional expression.

Trained as an architect, she approaches painting as a way of thinking through structure, order, and the emotional weight carried by space.

Born in Guiyang, China, Jianmo has lived and studied across multiple cities, including Tianjin, Los Angeles, and Berkeley. She received her Master of Architecture degree from UCLA in 2021. While architectural training grounded her in systems, proportion, and discipline, painting became the medium through which she could engage ambiguity, vulnerability, and interior states that resist function and resolution.

Her current practice centers on painting, often drawing from architectural fragments, human figures, and abstract spatial frameworks. Rather than depicting specific places, her works construct psychological architectures — spaces shaped by memory, tension, and in-between states. She is particularly interested in thresholds: between structure and intuition, control and collapse, presence and absence.

Working primarily in oil, she treats painting as a site of excavation rather than representation, allowing form and meaning to emerge through layered processes.

Jianmo currently lives and works in Los Angeles.