2026-02-28 11:52
Liu Yi's works integrate traditional Chinese ink wash painting with animation, multimedia, spatial installations, and other media. Using traditional frame-by-frame hand-drawing techniques, she creates a new visual language that explores the flow of time and space. The artist excels in incorporating details and circumstances from daily life into his works, depicting the chaos, confusion, and emptiness felt by urban dwellers.
The Earthly Men series showcased in this exhibition is inspired by the Danmin of southern China. These Danmin spend their lives drifting at sea, making boats their homes without a fixed foundation, much like floating duckweed, rootless and adrift, perennially existing on the fringes of society. Just like similar to modern urban strangers, especially immigrants and migrant workers, they often face challenges in cultural adaptation. In pursuit of better living and job opportunities in large cities, they suppress their true emotions and cultural identities in unfamiliar cultural environments, gradually becoming lonely and alienated. Although rooted geographically in the city, they remain psychologically lonely and adrift, further marginalized in society. This experience shares commonalities and feelings with the Danmin.
A three-minute visual work in thousands of hand-drawn frames, each frame crafted in traditional Chinese ink wash painting, is part of Liu Yi's creative process. "In the creative process, the work grows like time, continuously evolving, although it doesn't stray far from the initial framework and often changes spontaneously." For creation, after conceptualizing outlines and scripts, Liu Yi dedicates himself fully to painting, engaging in repeated contemplation and experimentation. The creative cycle often spans years. Building on traditional painting, the artist boldly experiments with various brushes, inks, papers, and modes of expression, combining vertical screen videos to transform viewers into participants. This interaction allows emotional responses between the real world and the virtual world on screen, expanding both visual and imaginative horizons limitlessly.
Related Artists: LIU YI 刘毅
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