Installation view of Yuri Yuan: Hide and Seek (April 16-May 14, 2025) at Alexander Berggruen, NY.

In painting, a rückenfigur is a person seen from behind. Like avatars in a digital space, they stand for us, encountering terrain we ourselves can’t. Yuan’s gazing figures do the same. The silhouetted person in Breaking Silence acts as a measurement of the enormity of the rearing wave it faces, mediating nature’s scale into a human one. The woman in the boat, casting the beam of her torch across the dark water in When You Are Found, translates the unknowable expanse of sea into a language of loss and anxiety that inscribes human meaning into nature’s blankness. The activity of looking that is the central event in so many of Yuan’s paintings is an embodiment of how we ourselves translate and make sense of the worlds we pass through. Even the figures sliding and bumping on the ice in Soft Shadows do this: they negotiate the world through the act of attention, even when it fails. In Yuan’s paintings, looking is active, a thing that happens.

It’s meaningful, then, that water in its various forms–stormy, calmed, turbulent, frozen–is a repeated motif in this body of paintings. Yuan’s stagings of reflection and negotiation find apt expression in watery surfaces. In this way, paint’s liquidity is what matters. The layering of color on color is a gradual act of concealment, in which a receiving surface is slowly obscured beneath a succession of marks, as though sunk. The deliberately incomplete surface of Where the Light Ends embodies this. As the layers of color articulate the tonality of hands, books, and crumpled paper, the underpainting of the observer and the furniture of the small room seem by contrast submerged below the surface. With the emergence of every legible shape or texture comes a hiding of what lies beneath.

Yuri Yuan
Where the Light Ends, 2024
oil on canvas
48 x 60 in. (121.9 x 152.4 cm.)

In Yuan’s paintings, then, something is found, and something is lost. This pull and push remains active even in paintings that locate the scene elsewhere. In the wallpaper patterns of Song of the Nightingale, surfaces scramble our efforts to decode them. The flautist, her back to the spotlight, turns toward the wall with its motifs of nature and culture in uneasy conjunction: metallic birds, a picturesque landscape, the façade of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The silent music of the painting hints at art’s submerged pleasures. And Yuan’s dialogue with Western art history dwells on this semantic and physical density. In the Art Institute of Chicago, where the artist did her BFA, there’s a painting by Édouard Vuillard entitled Foliage-Oak Tree and Fruit Seller (1918) that embodies painting’s tendency to compact possibility within the physicality of the object. What began as a real experience–the artist looking down from the second-floor window of his vacation home near Versailles, observing human and botanical activity beneath the canopy of a vast oak tree–is transmuted into a complex, bewildering surface of intertwined shapes and sudden plunges into shadow and depth. Vuillard’s work makes the case for painting as our best articulation of the strangeness of the world we see and cannot fully know. Like the woman in Yuan’s A Quiet Morning, we gaze into a space that defeats explanation, which is the world, and which is painting, too.

Yuri Yuan
A Quiet Morning, 2025
oil on canvas
60 x 48 in. (152.4 x 121.9 cm.)

Ben Street is an art historian, lecturer and author based in London. He is the author of several books for general readers, including How to Enjoy Art (Yale, 2021) and the award-winning children’s book How to Be an Art Rebel (Thames and Hudson, 2021). He lectures for the University of Oxford and the University of East Anglia and is a contributing writer for Apollo, Art Review, and the Times Literary Supplement.