Pleased to share Liu Yin’s first solo exhibition in China Spring Blossoms, Autumn Moon, presented by Aranya Art Center Guangzhou. Featuring her latest large-scale works, the exhibition traces the evolution of her painting practice over more than a decade.

Born in Guangzhou, Liu developed a distinctive painterly language through years of sustained practice. Drawing on the exuberant visual rhetoric of girls’ comic, she endows subjects from contemporary imagery and everyday still lifes with exaggerated, sparkling eyes and endearing faces. This theatrical and emotionally evocative transformation breaks through the original images’ serious framing, allowing the emotions and narrative structures underlying complex events to come to light.

Across a diverse range of subjects, Liu removes figures from their original settings and places them in new yet strangely familiar contexts, where they express feelings that are sometimes ambiguous and sometimes clear. These works distill years of social observation while tracing her ongoing refinement of a painterly language shaped by multiple aesthetic influences. Plaster casts familiar to artists, the fruits and vegetables of everyday life, a serene full moon above a quiet lotus pond, and the symbolically charged Mouth of Truth carving all merge with the innocent, at times absurd, visual rhetoric of girls’ comic. Within compositions that transcend the constraints of established power relations, hidden emotions find uninhibited expression.

— Courtesy of Aranya Art Center Guangzhou