ArtDepot is pleased to present the second solo exhibition of exclusive artist Liu Yufei, Pearl Diving, which will be presented at the 798 Art District in Beijing on February 25, 2024. This exhibition will feature more than 10 selected easel works, installations and videos from 2023-2024.
Antithetical balance, state fourAcrylic on canvas 200 x 200 cm 2023
The title of this exhibition, "Pearl Diving in Dongshan", is derived from the Book of the Later Han Dynasty and "Pearl Diving", which refers to the fact that entering the mountains to take pearls and seeking them in the wrong way in the face of treasures is a futile effort to know that it is fruitless, but at the same time, it also has the clumsy firmness and determination to open the mountain; The "East Mountain" is an image with a lot of allusions in traditional Chinese culture, it is the place of expedition in the Book of Songs, and it is also the recreation place of famous hermits in the Wei and Jin dynasties. 
Unit Collection, State NineAcrylic on canvas 150 x 180 cm 2023 Liu Yufei's way of working has a rigorous logic rarely seen in an artist, and in his last solo exhibition, his personal painting image system was clearly presented, and his recent new works provide a glimpse of his creative path. He has a strong interest in Persian miniature painting and Central Asian iconography, relying on the Tibetan palindromic pattern poetic deconstruction method, his paintings have formed a complete image generation structure, which is evolved and recreated by the illustrations extracted from historical allusions, and has obtained a new contemporary translation and sublimation with a strong sense of painting in Liu Yufei's paintings. When talent is integrated into the artist's continuous and stable creation, semantic excavation is not an easy task, and the creation of serious images is like pearl diving.
About the artist
Liu YufeiBorn in 2001, he graduated from the High School Attached to ** Academy of Fine Arts and studied in the Fifth Studio of the Oil Painting Department of ** Academy of Fine Arts. For Liu Yufei, painting is the endless production of images. Ideas, diagrams, formulas, and elements from history are extracted, mixed, combined, and cut: miniature paintings and landscapes, opposing balances and dancers' dynamic lines, palindromic poems and Tibetan Buddhist iconography, and so on, and reconstruct them into comprehensive units: geometric shapes, gesture lines, specific colors, and thus deduce local situations. Design, in this context, implies the arrangement of integrated units on the canvas: their free movement and blooming relative to the background, and a strict and even programmed relationship with each other. This is the direction of his painting: it is not through the complex appropriation of cultural symbols to reach the homeland of identity, or the end of some identity. Rather, it is to dance energetically in the ravines of images and the constellations of symbols—perhaps, a new space will be born in the infinite postures of dance, and will be extended and expanded in the strict process of painting. Notable solo exhibitions include: I Never Envisioned Being a Scorched Earth (Artdepot, Beijing, 2023); Exhibitions include: "I Am in the World of Fantasy" (Moca Yinchuan Yinchuan Museum of Contemporary Art, Yinchuan, Ningxia, 2023), "Electronic Shaman" (Groundless Factory, Beijing, 2024), etc. Liu Yufei's works have also been exhibited in many large-scale art fairs such as Shanghai ART021 and Hong Kong Art Central.