2026-02-28 11:45
In “ARTISTS WE LOVE,” we present widely acclaimed artists, their representative works, and key artistic movements across different historical periods. At the same time, we introduce promising young artists on the international stage whose works merit attention and collection, analyzing the reasons behind their growing recognition. Through artists and their works, we gain access to the spiritual temperament of different eras, engage in dialogue with everyday life, and develop multidimensional understandings of our present world.
The featured artist in this issue is Liu Yi. Born in 1990 in Ningbo, Zhejiang Province, Liu graduated from the China Academy of Art in 2016. On March 7, her new solo exhibition opened at ShanghART West Bund. Curated by Roger M. Buergel—Director of the Johann Jacobs Museum in Zurich and Artistic Director of documenta 12—the exhibition presents six video works spanning more than a decade of the artist’s practice, alongside related manuscripts and preparatory drawings. These works integrate ink animation, easel painting, and video installation, activating viewers’ intellectual and aesthetic experiences through an image language that continuously flows and evolves.
The video presentation of this exhibition was supported by Nanjing International Art Fair (NAFI). Founded in 2019, NAFI is dedicated to systematically fostering the development of video art in South China, creating a platform that balances global perspectives with local engagement, and emphasizing interdisciplinary practices within moving-image art. Liu Yi’s exploration of the integration of animation and artificial intelligence resonates with NAFI’s support for young artists experimenting across diverse media.
Entering ShanghART’s West Bund space and descending along the spiral staircase, visitors arrive at an immersive field framed by four screens emitting a fiery red glow. The energy released by Liu Yi’s solo exhibition, “Diffuse Layer,” radiates outward from the center of the gallery. This transmission of energy arises from how the artworks operate between opposing poles—technology and medium, nature and painterly intention, origin and evolution—allowing care and poetic sensibility to disperse and unfold from within.
The six works presented in Diffuse Layer comprehensively demonstrate Liu Yi’s recent expansions—both horizontal and vertical—within the medium of ink animation. Though diverse in subject and theme, they originate from the artist’s field research into diasporic communities across different regions and ethnic groups. In Liu’s practice, animation and painting become a continuously diffusing and expanding language, connecting the artist, her subjects, and viewers through shared affective experience.
The exhibition title, “Diffuse Layer,” functions as a multidimensional metaphor, open to both micro- and macro-level interpretations. “Diffusion” refers not only to the dispersal of memory over time, but also to the existential condition of marginalized groups and the intermingling of traditional ink painting with AI technology. Through painstaking frame-by-frame hand drawing, Liu renders each scene she encounters, revealing emotions obscured within lived realities. Her works ultimately traverse and suspend geography, technology, identity, and time, generating constant interweaving and transformation along the boundary between diasporic individuals and nature.
In Liu Yi’s practice, ink and animation serve as vehicles of diffused narrative, intensifying emotional flux through light and shadow. In First Encounter, she portrays the lived and psychological dilemmas of a Chinese chef working in Japan. In the realist narrative thread, she depicts his repetitive daily labor and fractured sense of identity in a foreign land through hazy brushstrokes. The fantastical thread constructs an underwater world of weightlessness with flowing ink, metaphorically expressing the tension between responsibility and the longing for freedom.
When presenting the preparatory drawings for First Encounter, two silk paintings placed back-to-back form a “double screen.” The artist combines painted imagery on one side with handwritten Japanese hiragana on the reverse, constructing a dual experience of reading and deconstruction. This approach subtly integrates the expressive spirit of traditional painting with overwriting and rewriting processes. A similar visual experience appears in White Water Youth, in which Liu portrays the Dan (boat-dwelling) community through close-up depictions of faces, hands, and drifting boats. Layered ink outlines on xuan paper create a nuanced effect of depth—simultaneously distant and near.
In Fire, the fluidity of the image contrasts with the burning intensity of flame, producing a sense of continual flow. Fire here embodies duality—offering warmth and illumination while also inciting destruction and pain. In The Psychoanalysis of Fire, Gaston Bachelard describes how combinations of the four elements—fire, air, water, and earth—correspond to humanity’s metaphysical imagination of the material world. Liu Yi’s “fire,” emerging from primordial energy, transforms into reflections of the psyche, enacting a contemporary turn.
The largest and most time-intensive work in the exhibition—developed between 2019 and 2025—Mornings and Dusk That Require No Management comprises a feature-length AI-assisted animation and dozens of preparatory drawings. The work recounts Liu Yi’s residency experience in Cyprus and her interactions with her host Vrionis and his family member living with cognitive impairment. The camera moves through an apparently uneventful small town: yellow-green fields, swaying shrubs, and interior scenes of Vrionis’s mother feeding her daughter warm soup. In this work, technology is imbued with warmth, constructing an extended inner temporality for viewers.
Another series, Carefully Crafted Unknown Errors, documents “unknown errors” generated during AI image production. Over five years, Liu trained AI models to learn her painting style. Importantly, she does not treat AI merely as a direct production tool. As the curator notes, Liu explores the presence of algorithms and “digital ghosts.” Despite possessing computational intelligence, machines fail to fully comprehend the real world, producing irregularities and fissures. Rather than discarding these fractures or adopting a purely technicist perspective, Liu reintroduces these “digital ghosts”—unnatural gestures and frame skips—into the pictorial field.
In one corner of the gallery, visitors encounter Liu’s earlier work On Evolution, where flowing ink and interwoven light and shadow unfold across a thin sheet of xuan paper covering the wall’s corner. Large granular cells erupt from the abdomen of a human body. Beneath the overt theme of “evolution” lies a hidden thread of “devolution”: human growth does not follow linear progress but undergoes deconstruction and regression, ultimately returning from organic to inorganic matter, blurring boundaries between life and materiality.
The diffused imagery and vitality in these paintings and animations encourage viewers to experience a private, durational sense of time. French philosopher Henri Bergson distinguished clock-time—an instrumental spatialization of time—from lived time, or duration. In Liu Yi’s work, multiple temporalities coexist: the artist’s labor time becomes spatialized in stacks of drawings; the duration of video corresponds to the quantity of frames. Perhaps her practice diagrams memory as a string of pearls—each pearl an independent moment. With every tick of the clock, we move from one pearl to the next.
Through diversified media support and sustained resource investment, NAFI provides a developmental platform for young artists domestically and internationally. By foregrounding experimental video art and reflecting shared concerns among young creators in a globalized context, it serves as an important nexus linking academia, market, and public art.
Rooted in a humanistic mode of existence, Liu Yi’s work emphasizes interdisciplinary narrative within moving-image art. Her works have been exhibited at major institutions worldwide, including Tate Modern (London), Seoul Museum of Art, Power Station of Art (Shanghai), Ichihara Lakeside Museum (Chiba), Messe Basel, Tai Kwun (Hong Kong), Guan Shanyue Art Museum, Macao Museum of Art, venues in Tallinn (Estonia) and Nicosia (Cyprus), New Chitose Airport (Japan), CHAT (Hong Kong), Zhejiang Art Museum, and Shanghai Oil Painting and Sculpture Institute Art Museum.
In 2024, her work When I Fell Asleep, Dreams Arrived won the Best Animation Award in the Mini Film Unit at the 26th Shanghai International Film Festival. In 2017, her work A Crow Cawed All Day was selected and screened at the Holland Animation Film Festival and received the Jury Special Recommendation Award at the Huashidai Global Short Film Festival.
Liu Yi’s practice sustains a contemporary transformation of traditional ink language while sensitively capturing individual predicaments within globalization. This combination of experimentation and humanistic care reflects the direction championed by this program. By integrating academic painting techniques with artificial intelligence, her work aligns closely with NAFI’s emphasis on interdisciplinary dialogue in moving-image art. It is foreseeable that her practice—rooted in tradition yet oriented toward the future—will find broader visibility within the academic and market platforms built by NAFI, while contemporary young artists’ reflections on technology and cultural identity continue to resonate with wider audiences through this vital nexus.
Related Artists: LIU YI 刘毅
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