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

These anxieties are personal to the artist. Inspired by the folktale of Ma Liang and his magic brush, Where the Light Ends stands out as the only self-portrait of the group. Yuan portrays herself seated on the floor of a bedroom dim with dusk, her figure faintly sketched against the bed’s wrinkled sheet and pillow—she nearly recedes into this study of light and drapery. A ray of soft light spills from a window, illuminating her hands, again rendered in color and fine detail, as she browses a pile of art history textbooks. The painting depicts a quiet moment of contact between the artist and a body of human knowledge, drawing our focus away from the figure and toward something more internal and allegorical. Yuan’s elegant crosshatching, the careful attention she gives to hue, the various emotions she evokes from the interplay of light and shadow—these techniques represent the mental processes by which the artist negotiates her various inspirations, working through her antecedents and distilling various sources into her own unique vision.

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

Yuan excels in a gloomy, crepuscular tone. When You Are Found evokes a primordial fear through a dark gradient of the sea slashed with gray waves and set beneath a sky whose layered and heavy brushstrokes loom like stalactites—a moody seascape whose emotional harbor is a feeble beam of light cast by a figure swept out to sea. The brushstrokes where the light meets the water are confident and assertive, piercing the heavy, apprehensive scene. This painting—along with Wishing Well, which depicts a figure peering over a bridge at the moon’s rippling reflection—abides by a dark, folkloric logic: the morass of history can be a fearful place where, if not approached with care and bravery, one risks losing one’s true sense of self.

What keeps these paintings from falling into a melancholic mode are Yuan’s compelling narrative sensibility and her ability to create emphasis through painterly detail. Lost in the World shows a view of Riverside Park dominated by a magnificent, glittering tree that sheds its leaves in a burst of fiery, autumnal hues. The dry-painted boughs flash with heat against the blue-gray river, rendered in a flat perspective inspired by classical Chinese brush-and-ink traditions. A solitary person strolls across this cloistered scene, seemingly oblivious to the cosmic vision above him. This perception of harmony at a slight distance appears again in Soft Shadows, where a group of ice skaters glides across a frozen pond. It’s a tranquil scene, yet a small cluster of trees cuts us off from the crowd—an urban idyll viewed from afar. Human activity gains the vantage of its rightful place: a festive crowd nestled and comfortably enclosed in this small pocket of nature. Two squirrels go about their business hunting for nuts in the foreground, rendered so playfully and with such apparent joy—their bushy tails erupt in plosive brushstrokes—that one can almost hear the consoling sound of their happy little chatter pinging throughout the grove.

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

Will Fenstermaker is a writer and art critic living in Los Angeles, where he works as a contributing writer to Frieze magazine and a senior editor at Sotheby’s. He previously held positions with The Metropolitan Museum of Art and The Brooklyn Rail, and in 2024 was awarded an Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant for short-form criticism.