Danninger Feng is a painter and multidisciplinary artist whose work holds a reverent space for impermanence, intimacy, and the quiet resilience of nature. Born in Ningbo, China, and currently based in Brooklyn while studying at Pratt Institute, Feng brings a poetic sensibility to everything she creates—from oil paintings to sculptural candles and self-built wooden stretchers. Her visual language centers the ephemeral and the overlooked: a fallen branch, a weed in the corner of a city block, or the tender gaze between kindred souls.
Feng’s oil paintings blur the line between still life and portrait, interior and exterior, city and wild. She sees herself in nature that struggles to thrive within the confines of the urban landscape—and her canvases reflect that tension. Each work is intimate and atmospheric, offering a space for vulnerability and reflection. With delicate brushwork and intuitive composition, Feng shapes surfaces that breathe with emotion and restraint.
Her series Irregular Dreams emerged from a place of practicality but evolved into a deeply personal exploration of form. Building her own shaped stretchers out of necessity, she found in their asymmetry a metaphor for adaptation, constraint, and transformation—forces she continually negotiates as an international student living between cultures.
Currently Exhibiting in: Bushwick, Brooklyn
Instagram: @danningerfeng
Website: danningerfeng.myportfolio.com
Feng’s work has already been recognized both in the United States and abroad. She was awarded Three Gold Keys by the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards, exhibited at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and was a featured artist in China’s Youth Neo-Realistic Art Award at the Ningbo Museum of Art. Her academic excellence at Pratt has been recognized with the FOLIO Award and the Mary Buckley Endowed Scholarship.
But perhaps most telling is her quiet statement: “I preserve the fleeting and frame the formless.” In a world that moves too fast to notice the subtle, Feng’s art is a pause—a breath that honors all that slips away.
Featured Artwork at Bushwick Gallery
An Irregular Dream IV
Year of Creation: 2024
Medium: Oil on canvas
Dimensions: approx. 42″ x 24″
Edition Type: Unique, 1 of 1
Location: Brooklyn, NY
Price: $5,900
Description
In An Irregular Dream IV, the figure merges with background, echoing themes of transience and connection. The shaped canvas becomes a boundary and a stage—where the act of painting is both excavation and offering. Each line speaks in whispers, but the impact lingers.
Veins of Spring
Year of Creation: 2025
Medium: Oil on canvas
Dimensions: 66″ x 45.5″
Edition Type: Unique, 1 of 1
Location: Brooklyn, NY
Price: $18,000
Description
Lush yet melancholic, Veins of Spring radiates with new life while remembering what was lost. Inspired by an earlier painting that marked a personal beginning, this thesis work reimagines growth and change as a layered process—both biological and emotional. Green returns to the frame, as memory returns to the body.
Exhibition Information
May 2025: Echoes of the Earth – Environmental Art
Curated by: Mekhi Deleon
Theme: Exploring the intersection of art and environmentalism, advocating for the planet through eco-art and other mediums.
Exhibition Dates: May 1 – May 8, 2025
Opening Reception: Thursday, May 1 | 6 PM – 8 PM
(for accessibility: full transcript below)
Enter a space where body and landscape dissolve into one another.
In An Irregular Dream IV, Danninger Feng offers a tender meditation on impermanence. Two shaped canvases tilt and stretch, holding figures that seem caught between rising and falling, rooted yet unmoored.
Look closer—the veins of a tree intertwine with veins beneath the skin. Flesh becomes root, body becomes branch. There is no clear division between what is human and what is earthbound.
Feng’s brushwork whispers rather than shouts, layering translucent tones of violet, crimson, and blue. The irregular frames act as thresholds, not boundaries—portals into spaces where memory, identity, and environment blur.
An Irregular Dream IV invites you to pause, to feel the quiet elasticity of becoming, and to honor what slips between categories of self and world.