San Francisco Art Fair: Booth D13

Yiwei Gallery is pleased to announce our participation in the San Francisco Art Fair from April 17 to 20, 2025. We will present a solo exhibition featuring artist Liu Tianlian, showcasing her recent silk paintings that focus on immigrant life experiences.

Liu Tianlian (b. 1987) reimagines the traditional Chinese meticulous brushwork technique (gongbi hua/工笔画) through a contemporary lens. Born in Chongqing, China, she now lives and works between Los Angeles and Beijing. Receiving her BFA and MFA in Chinese painting from the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts, her practice evolved to explore themes of cultural identity, psychological introspection, and the tensions of modern society through traditional techniques.

Liu’ work has been exhibited and collected in China and the United States, featured at institutions such as the Long Art Museum (Shanghai), Pearl River Museum of Art (Guangzhou), Hi Art Center (Beijing), Hive Center for Contemporary Art (Shenzhen), Line Gallery (Beijing), GR Gallery (New York), and VILLAGEONEART (New York). Her paintings, often executed on silk with traditional Chinese pigments, creates a distinct narrative to bridge cultural and temporal boundaries.

Since immigrating to the United States in 2023, Liu’s artistic practice has been increasingly inspired by immigrant-centered spaces like nail salons, laundromats, and street vendors. Liu transforms these ordinary spaces into dreamlike narratives that reflect her diasporic life and fantasies. Her intricate compositions, rendered with delicate precision, reinterpret the heritage of gongbi painting while engaging with contemporary concerns.

In these works, Liu captures the nuanced experience of immigrant life in American cities—from waiting in public laundromats and visiting Asian-operated nail salons to carrying shopping bags laden with necessities and cutting one's hair at home to save money. These everyday scenes become portals to explore deeper emotional landscapes and cultural intersections.

Laundromat (2024) exemplifies her approach to cultural hybridity. In Liu's artistic world, public laundromats are filled with subtle diversity: in the spinning machines, clothes remain constant yet undergo a transformation from soiled to clean; meanwhile, regardless of origin or lifestyle, people from different cultures and backgrounds share the same machines. In her paintings, the contrast between supernatural beings from various cultures inside the machines and her son playing quietly in front creates a vivid juxtaposition—both full of vitality and, through their integrated atmosphere, prompting viewers to contemplate the cultural identity conflicts and binary oppositions faced by immigrants.

A Street Corner in Manhattan (2025) illustrates how Liu transforms survival pressures into poetic imagery. Against a backdrop of urban graffiti, vendor umbrellas, and fragmented skyline, she depicts her husband as a "street guardian angel" with wings formed from colorful plastic shopping bags—symbolizing taking on the responsibility of caring for the family, protecting their life like an angel.

Color serves as both technical element and emotional language in Liu's work. Her bold chromatic choices through fluorescent tentacles in nail salon, crimson backgrounds in the tattoo studio, stark red-blue contrasts in childhood shadow scenes—create a surrealistic atmosphere where vibrant hues counterbalance the anxieties of displacement, shimmering in the light as the artist mixes pearl powder into traditional Chinese paints. Through this distinctive visual vocabulary, Liu offers viewers a momentary, humorous respite while maintaining a thoughtful dialogue with the complexities of contemporary existence.