Yuri Yuan

Faces in Yuan’s paintings are routinely obscured via water, distance, or orientation. In her 2021 Puddle, most of the composition consists of a serene reflection of a bare tree-covered environment, distorted through the still water. In the lower-center register, a form reminiscent of a figure’s head and shoulders darkens the silver-grey water. Below this shadow is the toe of an inconspicuous shoe. The ambiguities within Yuan’s paintings function as a guiding mirror for viewers to project their own perceptions.

In other cases, Yuan suggests the presence of an elusive figure, as in her 2021 painting A Train. A plain grey bag rests on the leftmost subway seat, implying another passenger in the subway car, sitting just beyond the canvas’s edge. This inaccessible stranger and the figure reflected in the subway window appear to be alienated from one another. When creating this work, Yuan was reading writer and cultural critic Olivia Liang’s book The Lonely City, which explores and seeks to redeem loneliness as a social condition within the context of work by artists like Edward Hopper. In speaking about why Hopper’s work is often associated with loneliness, Liang cites the ability of “blank walls and open windows,” features of “paranoid architecture, [...] to simultaneously entrap and expose.” [1] Here in Yuan’s A Train, the darkened subway window concurrently confines and reveals the reflected passenger. On the yellow center of the subway pole is a plastered chewed mound of gum. Yuan recalls relating to this gum in her loneliness within New York City: “I felt chewed up and spit out.”

Inspired by painters Lois Dodd and Alex Katz, Yuan streamlines her economy of shapes to employ abstract elements for metaphorical exposition. In her 2020 See You on the Other Side, a figure in a raincoat with its hood up faces away from a viewer, appearing to gaze out a window. A smaller figure, likely in the distance, stands far enough away that their features are also ambiguous. Absent discernable characteristics, the relationship between the figures remains open to interpretation. In the foreground, the figure is encompassed by a minimal, bold, black rectangle on the window. This pictorial frame acts as the gateway to the exterior rainy space. Although the transparent quality of the windows appears to be consistent, a pale yellow light enters the interior space only through the portal to the outside world, casting a trapezoidal shape around the figure’s shadow. The surreal light source implies that this environment may exist within a distant memory or a dream. In combination with the inclement weather, the seemingly impenetrable entryway may also represent a fear of stepping out into the unknown. Indeed, the figure is armed with a sky blue umbrella in the process of opening or closing, as “a metaphor for protection” in the artist’s words.

Similar to the Impressionists, Yuan is enchanted by recording the ways in which light and color fluctuate in relation to time and weather. The artist captures the ephemeral blue hour at twilight in her 2021 Blue Series. In speaking about this series, Yuan stated that these paintings operate within the constraint of “a very limited palette with a dominant cerulean blue pigment, mimicking the light at dusk. The continuity of subject matter and coherent palette make the images look like different shots in a film and therefore implies a narrative.” In these paintings, a figure, closed doorways, windows, and propagating plants are silhouetted in dark blues, contrasted by pale yellow sources of light. In Blue Series: Door, Yuan situates a viewer in a dark room in which light leaks through the edges of a scarcely open door. Likely in the same quarters, the contour of a cloaked figure stands unnervingly straight on in Blue Series: Figure. Two warped pale yellow rectangles in the upper-left register of the painting seem to reveal light from a neighbor’s window seeping into the public sphere. The figure is positioned between the young avocado plant—also seen in Yuan’s eponymously titled painting—and a single Pothos vine in a glass jar. In order for an avocado seed and a Pothos vine to form new roots, they must be severed from the original plant. Similarly, perhaps the figure’s removal from others presents an opportunity for development catalyzed by loneliness.

Yuan’s paintings capture fleeting illuminations of loneliness, rendered in enigmatic abstracted elements and environments of disconnect. Despite the discomfort of seclusion, Yuan meditates on the torrent of its emotion to contemplate the evolutions that may occur in reclusion.

1 - Olivia Laing, The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone, Picador, 2016, p. 29-30.