The following is an edited transcript of a conversation between Yuri Yuan and artist Rirkrit Tiravanija, which took place in April 2025. This interview appears in the exhibition catalogue Yuri Yuan: Hide and Seek published on the occasion of the eponymous exhibition.

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

Yuri Yuan: My show is titled Hide and Seek. When I played as a child, if my friends took too long to find me, I would start to feel anxious. What if no one ever finds me? What if no one even notices I’m gone? Why do we feel the need to hide? What are we running from? What do we choose to reveal to others? And what happens when we are lost? These are the questions that inspired this body of work. 

Some recent influences include the film All of Us Strangers (particularly its ending) and Haruki Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore, especially the narrative of the young protagonist’s decision to run away. Although I have not yet finished Kafka on the Shore, I found the idea of fleeing home deeply captivating.

Rirkrit Tiravanija: I think as a human, we are always trying to find ourselves, or our place in the world. In this occupation, we either forge our way or we fall into its trap of codes, rules, and expectations. The moment you can find yourself, you will no longer worry, or occupy yourself with the others finding you. When you have found yourself, you would be able to be left behind, forgotten, unnoticed, but that space, a place of solitude, is a place not everyone is able to occupy. The artist is able to occupy the void, because in that place of self and solitude, there are no rules, no demands and no expectations from the others. 

YY: I think this sense of detachment is evident in the figures in my new works—they acknowledge our presence but remain indifferent to our gaze.

I was reading Philip Guston’s I Paint What I Want to See and resonated with his quote—“…it’s like nailing down a butterfly but the damn thing is still moving around” and his observation of the gap between the mental image and the painted image. In my work, I always want the paintings to be aware of themselves as paintings, existing neither as a literal illustration of the world nor as a vehicle for a singular message. I reject linear narratives in favor of highlighting the discrepancies inherent in both our world and the artworks themselves. 

RT: The artist occupies the space where everyone yearns for a space of poetics, like Mr. Guston’s, it’s the space I paint what I want to see, it is the space where the butterfly keeps moving even when it’s pinned down.

I don’t know if it’s a conversation, but it’s ours to decide. As an artist perhaps you are not the one hiding, in fact, I think you are the one seeking. You are seeking to understand the place that you occupy. It is the place which is on both sides of the picture that you are painting, looking in and looking out.

YY: Thinking about the space that the artist occupies,  you’ve often discussed utopia and the creation of spaces for exploring possibilities. In my practice, I resist the idea of a linear answer; instead, I want my work to evoke emotions that can only be processed through art. I believe we both reject reducing artworks to simple slogans. Do you agree?

RT: Ha! Yes, I think most artists are trying hard in their work to make complexity in a world that has dumbed itself down to selfies and TikTok dance moves. I think that self-expressions are always complex and complicated; personalized experiences cannot be reduced into simple gestures. On the other hand, artists also work hard to not make their work into simple didactic self-explorations of life and life’s experiences. We as artists would like to draw the viewer into a place of consciousness, a place of self recognition and reflection, that moves us to better understand the complexities of sharing this world with other humans and other beings.

I loved looking at the expressions on the two squirrels in the painting Soft Shadows, I was in my own mind thinking, ‘Well, what are the squirrels thinking, and you look into those bright round eyes, and wonder!‘

YY: Haha, I’m glad you noticed the squirrels! They were fun to paint. I indeed thought about the perspective of squirrels as a stand-in for the audience. It is up to the audience to decide who is the subject/object of the gaze.

You’ve described your work as dismantling the gap between institutions and people, the Western notion of subject and object—a rejection of authority. In my work, each painting incorporates a metaphorical or formal veil that limits the viewer’s access to the painted world. These barriers emerge from vulnerability; the subject becomes aware of the voyeur and retreats within the painting, sheltered by these barriers. What are your thoughts on these “veils” in my work?

Yuri Yuan
Soft Shadows, 2025
oil on canvas
60 x 72 in. (152.4 x 182.9 cm.)

RT: In A Quiet Morning, a subject is shielding her face from the bright sun, but looking directly at you the viewer, certainly implicating the spaces of which we occupy. I thought it was interesting that though she was outside looking in (into my space), I felt like I was outside looking in (into the space of the painting she occupies). And in fact we are both occupying spaces outside. The small architectural indication wall opening (window) is just to frame us from the other. There behind her I thought was bright and luscious nature sun drenched, but soft rain clouds in the distance. But the expression on her is one of sternness, perhaps giving me a sense of judgment, that the world she is looking out into needs to shape itself up. Of course, I’m not having a real experience with the work while these thoughts are being made, as I’m looking at images of images. This has now become how we are all able to understand, and this has occupied the work or inhibited us in this world—we are living in between veils. In Where the light ends, the veil of darkness gives us details, hands images the feelings on pages of a book, lit by perhaps the full moon that is just elusively reflecting in the deep blue water of The Wishing Well, but I was rather interested as to what drawing or note one would have found on the lonely sheet at the tables corner. But perhaps it isn’t a voyeur that I am sensing of myself but rather an other occupying the same space. On the spaces of time, one is fixed in the memory of the artist, the other by the viewing of the viewer. I am looking at the large yellowing tree, perhaps it’s fall (somewhere), and in the distance, I notice someone walking by. It’s interesting in its unspecific/ ness that gives me the room to enter and occupy.

YY: I think veils in my work are often motivated by a sense of nostalgia. In your interview with Sarah Sze for Gagosian Quarterly, you mentioned, “In what I do, people don’t always realize but it’s all about memory.” Memory has long been a central theme in my work. Growing up in different places—China, Singapore, Chicago, and now New York—has imbued my paintings with a sense of longing and melancholy. For me, painting serves as a means to search through and capture these memories, offering both myself and the audience a space to reflect on the past. I’m curious if you feel that living in different countries has similarly shaped your perspective on memory and art.

RT: Well I certainly think it affords me a different perspective, it’s like always look in from the outside? There is a frame and as we move the frame moves, the frame gives me contrasts and comparison, and all the while, I’m looking into the corners people might be taking for granted, because it’s in their periphery and they are just focusing in on the center. I’m always looking at the edges, in the shadows, the underbelly. I would think that in painting you could give the viewer a perspective that they might not be paying attention to, a couple of the paintings are in the dark, and perhaps many may not want to be walking or standing in this darkness over a bridge looking into a dark wishing well!

YY: I agree that our experiences give us unique perspectives — both as artists of the diaspora and as makers of art. The act of making informs me just as much as my personal history does.

RT: I am not sure if you have read this Conversation between Philip Guston and Mark Stevens, which was reprinted in Ursula Magazine? I would like to reflect on those questions which came up in the conversation. As a non-painter, I find the conversation quite relevant for making art, but perhaps there could be questions that could come up in your process as a painter?

Philip Guston: You sweat like a dog for that. In the beginning the canvas is empty and you can do anything, and that’s the most frightening experience. You have to get the white out of the way. As you progress in the picture and it gets to where you’re involved with an inch in this rectangle which is your world, that’s when you’re most free.

Perhaps you can speak a bit about your approach, here Mr. Guston speaks about the anxiety of the empty canvas, and overcoming that emptiness as liberating, do you have that sense when you approach your canvas?

YY: I usually start with a colored ground instead of a white canvas. This thin layer of oil paint helps to seal off the surface and preserve the brilliance of the subsequent layers. The default color is a chromatic grey ( as in The Rain Still Finds Me), so that it’s easier for me to establish the value of the colors, how light would the lightest part be, and how dark would the darkest be. Sometimes I do a pink ground for landscape scenes, Lost in the World, for instance, as I want there to be a sense of warmth coming through the bluish water. In Where the Light Ends, most of the painting is the underpainting itself, which I started with a blue layer to create a specific mood. Therefore, I don’t feel anxious when the canvas is empty, as the color creates a space, a backdrop for a narrative, it’s no longer a void. 

Yuri Yuan
The Rain Still Finds Me, 2025
oil on canvas
60 x 48 in. (152.4 x 121.9 cm.)

RT: I thought I would go back to look at what Mr. Guston said and I found this interview from 1980, which might have been his last, very insightful. 

Philip Guston: You want to feel resistance. Or I want to. All my pictures must be fought for. Lots of overpainting and rubbing out. You want to have lived it. The complicated problem is when you do a painting that you think looks good. Then you go into the house and you go to sleep and you wake up in an hour convinced that you’re kidding yourself. You haven’t lived it yet. So, without even looking at the picture you scrape the whole thing out and stay with it until – this is the mysterious part – you feel transparent.

The relationship of the artist and the work, in his case, wanting to put down one’s experience—what one sees and feels—down into a fixed time and space, and how difficult it is.  

Do you struggle with the same kind of fights?  Do you go to bed feeling that you had managed to do it, only to scrape it all off the next day?  And when you do finally get to it, to the transparency, how do you discern, that you have reached that place?

YY: Yes, all the time. The anxiety usually kicks in after I’ve completed the first layer. I start to feel the gap between the image I want to paint and the one I’m actually painting. I begin to doubt whether I have the ability to close that gap, to salvage the piece. I don’t need to wait until the next morning — I know it’s a disaster while I’m sitting on the train home. Sometimes I think of a quick fix — a color or shape change. Other times, I struggle to find a way out and just wipe it off with Gamsol. I spiral, wondering, “Does the world really need this painting?” When a work isn’t working, it feels phony, it’s not coming from a genuine place.

The anxiety also comes from the outside world. It’s painful to erase three months of work with a deadline coming up. One of the greatest lessons I learned while teaching Intro to Drawing at Columbia came from my students. Most weren’t art majors — they weren’t trying to make great “art,” just a good drawing. And if it didn’t work, they’d get a new sheet and start again. That courage really moved me. I still think about it when I’m stuck.

RT: When do you let it go? And if you could let it go, do you feel free from it, or do you always circle and try to go deeper? To get to where you live in it, perhaps? Perhaps, it’s a game of hide and seek, and transitory, because you are never living in a fixed place, you are still homeless?

YY: It’s hard to say when you’ve reached it. There are paintings I once thought, “That’s it, I’ve done it!” — but looking back, there’s so much I’d change. Time is a gift; it lets us see the work and ourselves differently. Maybe there’s a right destination for a painting — maybe this particular red makes the most sense. But it can’t contain everything I felt or wanted to say. That’s the limitation and beauty of painting: a still image on a two-dimensional surface. Once it’s done, it’s done. There’s always more to explore. It’s like seeing someone’s profile in a mirror and wanting to see the other side. I’m not sure if I’m going deeper, but I want to make something different — especially as a young artist. Each painting holds a fraction of me. I move from one to the next like a “homeless” person, and I’ll always be “homeless.” For me, it’s the search, the journey towards making the “ultimate work” knowing fully that there will be no “ultimate work” that makes being an artist so meaningful. 

Philip Guston with Mark Stevens, “Philip Guston in conversation with Mark Stevens. 1980,” Ursula, 2019.

Sarah Sze with Rirkrit Tiravanija, “Artist to Artist: Sarah Sze & Rirkrit Tiravanija,” Gagosian Quarterly, Winter 2024 Issue.

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