Artist Spotlight: YaYa Yajie Liang

We welcome YaYa Yajie Liang to the gallery for our group exhibition Dante’s Inferno. In dealing with the human body and its material relationship to the ground beneath our feet, Liang’s work develops many key motifs of the show, but we hear from the artist why she often avoids directly visualising literature.

YaYa Yajie Liang’s artworks operate with a phenomenal resolution. The abstractions she builds across her towering canvases deal with macro and micro concepts simultaneously, locating themselves within everything from continental fossils to cellular structures.

“I feel that the way I see and perceive the world is a phenomenological one. When I focus on something, it is as if I enter their interior, as if reality suddenly rips apart and I fall involuntarily into mazes inside their bodies, whether living species or non-living matter.”

Liang’s work often uses the human body as a departure point for such phenomena, a vehicle with which to navigate a world entangled with those of animals and minerals. Metamorphosing, becoming animal, making alliances with other forms of life; these all play a part in the artist’s negotiations with reality, especially set against a global context of ecological catastrophe and decline. Deeply influenced by Karen Barad’s theory of ‘agential realism’, Liang explores the world from an internal perspective, contrary to the modern view that humans and nature are somehow distinct from one another or that the natural world is something to be observed from a distance. The artist imagines a Symbiocence future, a proposed era of reconnection between humans and nature, where humans live in a more balanced and sustainable way with the rest of life on Earth. She confirms, “The fact that all living creatures and non-living matter exist in a constantly flowing cycle, guides me to reconsider what it means to be human.”

Hiking across the White Cliffs in the South of England brought Liang face to face with the reality of this philosophy, where she was able to engage with the materiality of natural history within the exposed cliff faces. Observing various traces of animal bodies, white chalk, trapped organisms and crystalline structures through the layers of sedimentary rock she was able to witness an instant of the universal process by which minerals become animals, animals become fossils, and fossils become minerals. “In some senses, I feel their deep echoes within my own body.”

Her awareness of the life-cycle of natural structures similarly guides Liang’s painting process. Rather than be led by her consciousness, unruly encounters between her body and her chosen materials invigorate her paintings as organisms with wills to act by themselves. 

Liang was drawn to Dante Alighieri’s writings through his depictions of the body under duress, and the physical responses that picturing the conditions of Hell elicits. Read more below to hear from the artist about these aspects to her practice and how research continues to develop her work.

Unit: YaYa, what first drew you to the exhibition Dante’s Inferno?

YaYa Yajie Liang: Every time I read The Divine Comedy it evokes a bodily sensation. It is interesting to consider the punishment of the physical body in each level of hell, and connects to my interests concerning bodily manipulations, like Gregor in Kafka’s The Metamorphosis waking up as an insect.

U: How do you feel your work develops and interprets the themes of the show?

YL: Personally, I don’t trust work that directly visualises literature. Painting should do more than illustrate. I think in Spasm (2024), I aim to capture a state of being, a critical state where the body curls up and shrivels in an instant. I am questioning how you push your body to its limits, until it can’t take any more suffering. Additionally, the ‘body’ here has moved beyond the category of human. It is orientated towards anything that is condensed and dispersed.

U: What are you working on at the moment?

YL: My latest works include paintings, drawings and writings that all fall under my ongoing research into the continuation of different life forms. My PhD research is helping me rationalise and deepen this idea of the entanglement and co-existence of life. For example, I became aware of the potential of working in different media, using non-human materials to drive the transformation of my painting. My practice is no longer entirely controlled by my subjective consciousness; rather, it is a trace left through the movement of my body and the media it encounters.

U: How has your work developed in the past year?

YL: There are more unrecognised forms emerging in my recent paintings. I feel that these figures are shaped during the painting process rather than being premeditated. You can see the boundaries between different forms disappearing; rather, they are beginning to exist within each other.

U: Can you expand on your interest in the “Centre of Hell”?

YL: Well, the “Centre of Hell” in The Divine Comedy represents the ultimate point of despair and isolation, where Satan himself is trapped in ice in eternal immobility and silence. The contrast between a state of stability and transformation is fascinating to me, as in the ‘Centre of Hell’ a physical body will never change or metamorphose. If we pull our perspective back to reality, where our ecological systems are very fragile and we are extremely vulnerable creatures, the idea of an inaccessibly pure body doesnt exist anymore. It is interesting to consider which of these situations presents a worse version of hell; stasis or decline? I think the ‘Centre of Hell’ provides a real hell, since an inability to change can feel like personal torture.

U: What sort of environment do you need to feel creative?

YL: I enjoy working in a very organised way. I’m always up early, getting the bus to my studio, and although it doesn’t take too long I get to take the time as a prelude to the day’s work. I often immerse myself in fiction — Kafka, Tokarczuk, Calvino — whose narratives offer a subtle transition from the everyday to the liminal space of my practice, as if preparing for an impending journey. Upon arrival, my mornings are dedicated to drawing on paper and writing reflections on the previous day’s paintings, a ritual that grounds the atmosphere before the rest of the day.

U: What are you reading to find inspiration?

YL: Currently I am reading Olga Tokarczuk’s novel Primeval and Other Times (1996). It brings together fragments of God’s time, Human’s time, Nature’s time… They all intersect at Primeval, a town at the centre of the universe. She writes that when one tree dies, another tree receives its dreams and carries on this meaningless, unimpressive dream. Therefore, trees do not die. For me, dreaming becomes a path to connect different forms of life, to connect the living and non-living in a Shamanistic way.

U: If you were going to be trapped for eternity in one of Dante’s nine circles of hell, which would you choose? 

YL: That’s a very interesting question. Honestly, none of them!