Where Light Dwells : Yi Liu

Cob 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. The series emerges from a profound personal rupture, following a member of the artist’s family losing their sight. This experience prompted a reorientation in Liu’s understanding of light - not as illumination or symbol, but as something fragile, finite, and inseparable from perception itself. Here, light does not describe the world; it structures it. It enters the pictorial field abruptly, reorganising form, colour, and spatial hierarchy, often destabilising what appears visible. At the same time, Liu embeds a further polemic - that of light and darkness as interdependent, opposing forces. Darkness is not treated as absence, but as a necessary condition for light’s emergence and legibility. The two exist in continuous tension, each defining and sustaining the other. This dynamic unfolds across the works through sharp divisions, suspended atmospheres, and shifting thresholds of visibility, where illumination and obscurity are held in a state of fragile equilibrium. Liu’s visual language draws from both Eastern and Western iconographic traditions, allowing them to converge within a shared pictorial space. Motifs such as the phoenix and dragon- long associated in Chinese cosmology with balance, transformation, and cosmic order appear alongside compositional structures and figural arrangements that recall Western religious and art historical painting. The near-touch of two figures subtly echoes The Creation of Adam, while angelic presences, pomegranates, and garlands invoke a lineage of Renaissance and Baroque symbolism tied to fertility, divinity, and the continuity of life. Rather than treating these references as fixed symbols, Liu allows them to remain fluid and contingent. Eastern and Western traditions are not set in opposition, but collapse into one another, generating a hybrid iconography that resists stable interpretation..