Liu Ye: Naive and Sentimental Painting

David Zwirner is pleased to present an exhibition of recent paintings by Chinese artist Liu Ye, on view at the gallery’s London location. This is the artist’s second solo presentation with the gallery and the first time his work has been shown in London since 2002.

In his deeply meditative paintings, Liu investigates the intersections of history and representation through a distinct vocabulary that transcends time and place, evoking conceptual and emotional registers of meaning. Carefully balanced and lushly rendered, his works encompass a diverse range of aesthetic and cultural sources. Drawing on both his childhood memories and his early education in Europe, Liu captures the likenesses and legacies of authors such as Vladimir Nabokov, Hans Christian Andersen, and William Shakespeare; twentieth-century Chinese cultural icons, including actress Ruan Lingyu and writer Eileen Chang; and modernist painters, architects, and designers, from the Bauhaus to Balthus. These various points of reference have inspired Liu’s paintings for more than thirty years, resulting in a body of work that is at once rich in its historical quotations and singularly his own.

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Image: Installation view, Liu Ye: Naive and Sentimental Painting, David Zwirner, London, 2023