Xiong Wenyuan was born in Chongqing. In 1955. She graduated from Sichuan Fine Arts Institute in 1983 with a Bachelor of Fine Art, going on to study in the Chinese Painting Department of the Central Academy of Fine Arts and the China National Academy of Arts from 1985 to 1987, she graduated from the University of Tsukuba in 1993 with an MFA in Japanese Painting. From 1993 to 1996, Xiong Wenyun worked as a guest researcher at the Asakura Naomi Research Laboratory of Bunkyo University in Japan.

From 1998 to 2001, she produced a large experimental art project called Moving Rainbow, then created the Kongkongseries before commencing research and practice of children’s art and education.

In 2020, while caring for her ailing mother, she began to record things around her on the back of used medicine boxes from her mother’s medical regimen. For three years after her mother was discharged from the hospital, she created the Hospital series, the Arrow series, and the Medicine Box series. In her decades of artistic practice, her works have been deeply influenced by her early experience of going to the countryside in the Aba Tibetan and Qiang areas. Themes of humanity and nature, as well as the cycle of life and death, have always been important to Xiong Wenyun.