West, London
Yi Liu
Where Light Dwells
Cob GalleryCob is pleased to present Where Light Dwells - Yi Liu’s second solo exhibition at the gallery marking the beginning of a new painting series. Yi Liu’s practice unfolds through distinct bodies of work, each developed under a single title. This approach treats every series as a self-contained conceptual and painterly world, with its own internal logic and visual language. Previous bodies of work- World Theatre, Searching the Mountains (presented in her debut solo exhibition at Cob), and The Hunt- trace a trajectory in which mythological, psychological, and narrative elements are reconfigured across shifting formal concerns. In these earlier works, Liu drew from traditional Chinese mythologies to construct fluid, ambiguous worlds where human, animal, and divine forms converge. In The Hunt, in particular, these hybrid figures operated within charged narrative spaces - staging desire, pursuit, and power through symbolic encounters that destabilised fixed identities and gendered hierarchies. At the same time, the paintings were shaped by an ongoing negotiation of cultural position - an exploration of Liu’s Eastern identity articulated through the language and techniques of Western painting where questions of translation, displacement, and hybridity remained central. Where Light Dwells marks a decisive departure. Developed following the artist’s residency at Palazzo Monti, this new body of work moves beyond this framework, withdrawing from allegorical narration and questions of cultural positioning toward a more fundamental inquiry into perception itself. The mythic no longer functions as story, but as condition; identity is no longer foregrounded as subject, but subsumed within a broader, more unstable field of seeing.