Xiao Yu

My artistic intention isn't only for doing pictorial practice, even though the paintings possess an abstract geometrical appearance at first glance. The painting-based work is not merely a painterly canvas; instead, an anatomic object, like a body, has its front and back--inside out and outside in, that I can manipulate. This conceptual action fertilised the idea of Underbelly, engages with those vulnerable spots of painting as elements, reveals the unseen, the weakness, the neglected, and activates the peripheries of the painted surface on whatever corporal and psychic levels. Simultaneously, each is stripped and reassembled, cut, re-joined, folded, and unfolded to generate the physical curves of painted lines and colour field out the surface into another dimension.

Thus, the wall will not be functional enough to perform the work, and it can suspend, touch the ceiling, or stand on the ground. It forms an assemblage of the composition of painted or substantial lines and planes. It also proposes to overthrow the way of seeing the painting and extend its boundary by turning it inside out. My work is pertinent to reducing pictorial meaning and suggests a conceptual tactic for an alternative idea of beauty.

In short, I utilise manipulating painting to question its origin within the painting's discourse, reflect itself, and address its subsistent and rarely detected weaknesses by placing them as central to the making. My work, in a sense, is also a visual formulation of my reaction to real life.