Liyu’s latest works display her never-ending quest to portray what it is to be a woman living in our dissonance age. They contain a new depth of phycological energy and insight into the reality of existence. Like her previous works they use her emotional charge colors contained within linear reliefs, and created from three-dimensional objects, to create a world of the inside and outside.

These relief sculpture-like forms create a flowing line that modulates and repeats itself across the surface of the painting, much like a musical score. Contain within this unique space of colors and lines is the personification of the archetype woman, the heroine. Outside the line, another world exists which is kept separated from the inner world of the image. The line itself forms a barrier from this world, a protective wall. It creates a space of isolation. A relief from the cognitive dissonance of our world.

The raft has been used many times in stories. It is the last means of escape from a lonely island. The traveler is alone and yet often guided by an external entity. They trust much to luck, knowing the raft can easily sink and there is no protection on board, only a flat deck. They are trying to reach home. Liyu’s heroine is a figure in motion. The image repeats itself and echoes the movement of another shape. In some paintings the repetitions spread out like Nike’s wings, in others, they echo back into themselves in quiet self-reflection.

All of Liyu’s new works flow across the surface in rhythmic composition, reminiscent of a musical sympathy. They develop into a newly heightened awareness of what is contained within the composed form and what is without. Her new works are composed in the same style using modulating lines and colors, however, the surfaces in these works have taken on a more translucent quality. What is inside the line and what is outside the lines create a unique “light” in the works, which has the feeling of stained glass. The works have a feeling of thought outside the work. A quiet awakening.

Combined with this luminesce quality of the colors, the line itself is reminiscent of the musical form called a “deceptive cadence”, where a musical chord progresses and seems to lead to resolving itself on the final chord; but does not. This musical form is a perfect analogy to the world we now live in, “the dissonance age”. Where a never-ending tread of social media winds a tale around the world in a never-ending circle until a clear sense of reality is given up. Liyu’s heroine is both inside this world and outside it. Moving across and through it.