Lyn Liu joins Kasmin

Kasmin is thrilled to welcome Lyn Liu (b. Beijing, China, 1993) to the gallery. To celebrate the announcement, a new large-scale painting titled Herd mentality-Flock (2023) will go on view at The Armory Show this week through Sunday, September 10. Liu’s first exhibition with Kasmin, Dogville, was presented in 2022. 

Liu’s work in painting and printmaking addresses the psychological tension that underpins relationships between individuals. Through a sequence of uncanny cinematic tableaux, the artist mines her own personal experiences of alienation, utilizing symbolism and an atmosphere of the absurd to provoke reflections on what Liu considers our oppressive social reality. 

Nicholas Olney, President of Kasmin, comments: “We’re thrilled to release the news of Liu’s representation. Lyn has emerged as a singular voice in contemporary painting with a visual language all her own, coupled with a deep sense of the strangeness and uncanny beauty of the human condition in the 21st century.”

Eric Gleason, Head of Sales at Kasmin, added: “Seeing Lyn’s work for the first time was the kind of transfixing moment one fantasizes about. Her approach to each individual painting and her practice at-large is so deeply thoughtful, so mature, so self-reflective, and so culturally-aware. It is an immense pleasure to be working with Lyn and we look forward to doing so for decades to come.” 

Conceiving of her compositions as stills in an overarching narrative, the artist takes a filmic approach to considerations of light, staging, and costume. Depicting scenes often situated in the evening or at night, Liu’s tightly rendered dreamscapes feature figures whose identities are concealed, masked, presented alongside a doppelganger, or hidden in shadow. This voyeurist instinct—a longing to see without being seen—acts both as a visual strategy and a window into the artist’s experience as a child, when she traveled between cultures feeling like a perpetual outsider. 

The striking symbols in Liu’s paintings pulsate with a nihilist or existentialist philosophy in the vein of Albert Camus and Franz Kafka, whose work the artist has referenced throughout her oeuvre. Liu’s interest in the book The Architectural Uncanny by Anthony Vidler further elaborates on the metaphorical potential of buildings and interiors in the work to speak to our modern condition. 

The artist repeatedly returns to animal subjects as counterparts to her human figures. Recognizing both wild and domesticated animals as unknowable, unpredictable, and potentially dangerous, Liu’s use of ostriches, frogs, and kangaroos as symbols occasions a fissure between the cycle of mutual observation found in human society. Employed in her paintings, they act to highlight the confusion of spectacle and the sense of alienation that can attend a condition of being observed. 

Lyn Liu was born in Beijing, China, and is based in New York. She received her MFA from School of the Arts, Columbia University, New York, in 2022, and her BFA from the School of Visual Arts, New York, in 2016. Liu also attended École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux- Arts, Paris, from 2017 to 2020.

For more information, email info@kasmingallery.com