YveYANG Gallery is pleased to present On the carpet of leaves illuminated by the moon by London-based painter Xinran Liu (b. 1998). The exhibition will be on view from October 25 to December 21, 2024, with an opening reception on October 25 from 6–8 pm.

Xinran Liu’s large-scale translations of memory start with a singular color — purple for a visit to her grandmother’s grave, yellow for a glimpse of her parents’ new pet birds, green for the midnight sound of the street outside her window — and emerge tangled and kinetic.

When she begins painting, Liu references a feeling or memory rather than a physical sketch. She reworks her lines and forms until her canvases are much the same as the recollections that spurred them: fleeting but underscored with layers of redirection, like the memories we all recall, misremember, and continuously rewrite. In a yellow-hued painting of a pair of caged birds, the first pets her parents brought into their home in China, Liu began with structural guidelines — stretching and grounding lines which she erased and blurred and layered and repainted until she had set them in motion, wings reaching beyond the confines of a cage rendered nearer to a suggestion than a hardened reality. When they’re finished, Liu’s works are as universally evocative as they are biographical.

Liu translates her first visit to her grandmother’s grave in The endless sticky noise and inertia coming out from the bud. The flowers on the cemetery hill rise to the foreground, reaching toward the upper bounds of the canvas before descending in wilt. It’s a hyper-specific feeling — seeing signifiers of familial love weathered in a cemetery — that Liu transmits in vibrant, textured stems below a flattened orb of moonlight. Is it sharing or stealing light? The artist delves further into the memory in a pair of subsequent paintings: one centers on the entrancing immediacy of grief, and the other probes mythical ideations of death. The flowering trigger of the memory rears itself in each.

Seeds of memory are easily transmittable in Liu’s hand, which imparts the feelings that have maintained the memories in Liu’s mind for so long. The artist’s work speaks to the universality of even hyper-specific circumstances: melancholy amidst beauty, happiness, and motion inside the bounds of a cage.

Liu earned a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and an MFA from the Royal College of Art in London. She lives and works in London.

Text by Elaine Velie.