Yi Liu’s Debut Solo Show Searching the Mountains at The Cob Gallery Camden

By Maggie Horneff September 2024

Image Credits: Cob Gallery Camden, Liu Ying's Searching the Mountains, Private View 2024.

On Wednesday evening Yi Liu’s first solo show, Searching the Mountains, opened at The Cob Gallery in Camden. Noted for her unique blend of Eastern and Western painting techniques, her debut series immerses viewers into a space of cultural curiosity, questioning, and observation.

Liu merges the tactile warmth of earthy colours with a rich tapestry of traditional imagery, exuding a dream-like quality to her work. The juxtaposition between intricate imagery and expressive brushstrokes illustrating fantastical figures introduces a layer of absurdity to her work. Liu adopts the multi-scene compositional elements of traditional Chinese paintings, integrating Eastern and Western approaches to enrich her narrative. She reflects her own cultural experience through the duality of her artistic techniques, exploring the process of maintaining her Chinese identity while living and painting in the West for the first time.

Image Credits: Searching the Mountains for Demons, Zheng Zhou, The Metropolitan Museum

The series is directly inspired by the 17th-century Chinese painting Searching the Mountains for Demons by Zheng Zhou, which depicts divine warriors trekking through mountains in search of demons and monsters. Yi Liu inverts this legend in her series by portraying the traditionally human characters as demons and the monsters as heroes. By doing so, Liu calls viewers to question the dichotomies of morality, justice, power, and subjugation, presenting an alternate space where what is conventionally deemed "good" is revealed as "evil." Her thought-provoking approach to the narratives behind her work, encourages personal reflection on contemporary social structures, emphasising the importance of questioning the inherent nature of good and evil. Liu subtly prompts viewers to consider the complexities of power and information through a simple narrative reversal in the traditional depiction of heroes and villains.

Searching the Mountains is showing at the Cob Gallery in Camden until the 5th October 2024.