Yiwen Liu (b.1999) is a London-based artist who graduated from Central Saint Martins and received her MA in Painting from the Royal College of Art in 2024.
Liu’s fluid abstractions emerge from fleeting moments and emotional undercurrents, approached with quiet introspection and sensitivity to memory. Her compositions unfold gently, where color dissolves into atmosphere, and presence lingers with absence. Each brushstroke becomes a deliberate act—an intuitive dialogue seeking the emotional essence of impermanence, where the personal transforms into something universally felt.
She embraces the idea that human emotions are not singular or fixed. Joy and sorrow, intimacy and solitude often arise together—not as contradictions, but as mirrors of one another. Her work follows a rhythm akin to Daoist thought, where seeming opposites flow into each other like dusk into night, revealing a quiet wholeness through duality.
In her process, softness becomes strength, and clarity is found through ambiguity. Her paintings dwell in the in-between, giving form to the unspoken layers of experience. Memories are not frozen; they flow, shift, and return with new meaning. Through abstraction, she opens space for viewers to inhabit their own emotions—those subtle, mixed, often unnamed states that resist definition but shape who we are.
Selected Exhibitions::
2025
Moving Stones Gather No Moss, Norito Gallery, London
Symbiosis, Freshsalad, Bristol
2024
BEEP Painting Biennial, Swansea
Both, Inward and Out There, L.L. Contemporary, Canada
Situational, Nnonfoundation, London
RCA 2024, Dyson Building, London
Out of Thin Air, Southwark Park Gallery, London
2019
CSM Show, Lethaby Gallery, London
Charlie Brown Exhibition, Somerset House, London