Aranya Art Center Guangzhou is pleased to present Spring Blossoms, Autumn Moon, the first institutional solo exhibition by Chinese artist Liu Yin. 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’ comics, 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’ comics. Within compositions that transcend the constraints of established power relations, hidden emotions find uninhibited expression.
This exhibition is organized by Associate Curator Wu Yiyang and Program Coordinator (Guangzhou) Chen Siyu at the Aranya Art Center.
Liu Yin
Born in 1984 in Guangzhou, China; lives and works in Hong Kong.
After receiving her master’s degree from Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts, in more than a decade’s time she has developed a subversive artistic language that uses exaggerated, watery, and sparkling eyes to create classic girls’ comic faces on widely circulated contemporary images; public figures from academic, scientific, and political worlds; pop culture characters, and inanimate beings. Simultaneously concealing their expressions and revealing deeply hidden characters—a true self that is feminine or innocent—Liu reconstructs the emotions, feelings, and narrative structures embedded in complex events.
Liu’s recent solo exhibitions include: Summer, Kiang Malingue, Hong Kong (2025); Spring, Kiang Malingue, Hong Kong (2023); Publica, Arrow Factory, Beijing (2015); Liu Yin: Oh, Chinese Boy... Don’t Be Ashamed…, Chinese Culture Center of San Francisco, San Francisco (2011); Reflections In the Soup, Observation Society, Guangzhou (2010). Recent group exhibitions include: Symbiotic Longing, TAO ART, Taipei (2024); Meta Media Art Festival, Tai Koo Li Qiantan, Shanghai (2023); Where Jellyfish Come From, Antenna Space, Shanghai (2022); In the Labyrinth, Edouard Malingue Gallery, Shanghai (2021); Dream (Is) land!, MINE Project, Hong Kong (2021); Folded Veil, Edouard Malingue Gallery, Hong Kong (2019); Condo Shanghai, Antenna Space, Shanghai (2019); Full of Peril and Weirdness: Painting as a Universalism, M WOODS Museum, Beijing (2015); Berlin Studio, Import Projects, Berlin (2014); Transience: Intractable Objects, Taikang Space, Beijing (2014); Not in Fashion, Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts, Guangzhou (2011).
