EXHIBITIONS

On the Carpet of Leaves Illuminated by the Moon

Xinran Liu

10.25.202412.28.2024

Opening Reception: 10.25.2024, 6–8 PM

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 31, 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.

—Elaine Velie

Xinran Liu (b. 1998, Chengdu, China) is a Chinese artist based in London. She holds a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and received her MFA in Painting from the Royal College of Art. In 2023, Liu was shortlisted for the Chadwell Award. She creates artwork that stores her memories, transforming these moments into graphic narrations and textual illustrations. Liu’s works have been exhibited internationally in cities including London, Shanghai, Beijing, Taichung, Hong Kong, and Chicago.

Opening Reception: 10.25.2024, 6–8 PM
 

Works Exhibited

Xinran Liu
And he said and I and he said and I but I can't
2023

Oil on canvas
140 × 170 cm
55 × 67 in
Xinran Liu
The last note vibrating through the night
2024

Oil on canvas
160 × 132 cm
63 × 52 in
Xinran Liu
the endless sticky noise and inertia coming out from the bud
2024

Oil on canvas
140 × 160 cm
55 × 63 in
Xinran Liu
Untitled
2024

Oil on canvas
117 × 168 cm
46 × 66¼ in
Xinran Liu
Jump, jump up!
2023

Oil on canvas
150 × 200 cm
59 × 78¾ in
Xinran Liu
A footnote of June 12th
2023

Charcoal, colour pencil, and oil on canvas
150 × 100 cm
59 × 39¼ in