Yan Ming-Huy attended the Chiayi Girls’ Senior High School and graduated from the Department of Fine Arts at the National Taiwan Normal University in 1979. Upon graduation, Yan and her husband moved to the United States. While raising her son, Yan pursued a Master of Arts from the State University of New York, Albany and graduated in 1987. She also took courses at the Fashion Institute of Technology and received a degree in textile design in 1989. Yan returned to Taiwan in 1990 and started to participate in various group exhibitions. She was also a member of the group Erhao gongyu [Number two apartment], an avant-garde art group founded by artists returning from overseas studies.

Yan’s works explore subjects of the female body, sex and gender relations from a feminist perspective, often consciously subverting traditional representations of these themes. She was one of the first artists in Taiwan who openly advocated and expressed feminist thinking in art and frequently referenced her own experience in an ill-fated marriage as inspiration for her works. Yan’s works in the 1990s depicted close-ups of flowers, fruit and vegetables as symbols of female desire and genitalia. Wax Apples and Breasts (1990) was one such example, in which the artist juxtaposed sixteen breasts of various shapes with wax apples – a fruit grown in Taiwan with a shape that is often likened to a woman’s breast in the public imagination.

Feminism remained a contentious topic in the 1990s Taiwanese society and art scene. As she faced criticism of her controversial works, Yan continued to fight for gender equality by creating works that would provoke awareness of women’s rights, especially on the autonomy of the female body. In the early 2000s, Yan reduced her participation in activities in the conservative climate of the Taiwanese art world and began shifting her focus towards studying ideas of Buddhism. Her works during this period explored the philosophical and spiritual aspects of human nature. Yan actively worked to counter the conservative Taiwanese culture and society in which she had grown up. She set an example for both her contemporaries and later generations of artists to audaciously explore sensitive subject matter and encouraged the discourse of feminism through her activism and art practice.

Yan participated in many thematic group exhibitions, including Women’s Art Week in 1990, co-sponsored by the Eslite Bookstore in Taipei, and the 1994 exhibition of women artists’ works at the New Phase Art Space in Tainan. In 1992, she was invited to participate in The Taipei Biennale of Contemporary Art, one of the most prestigious art exhibitions in Taiwan. She held her solo exhibition at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum in 1994. Her works have been collected by Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts, National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts and various private collections.