Xing Yu Liu is a dynamic multimedia artist whose work encompasses film, photography, and theatre. With a degree from Shaanxi Normal University in Radio and Television Directing, Liu has built a career serving as a freelance portrait photographer and tour guide at institutions the likes of the National Gallery and Victoria and Albert Museum. Their early involvement with the FIRST International Film Festival and managing new media for a university theatre society laid the groundwork for a creative journey centered on cross-cultural dialogue.
Liu’s artistic practice has attracted a wide audience with exhibitions in London at venues such as Fox Yard Studio, Capital Art Gallery, and Hartslane Gallery. At the same time, their work in theatre and film has been displayed in Chinese productions, from thought-provoking projects like The Old Woman Returns to Her Hometown, as well as Alive to pioneering festival screenings that have graced several cultural establishments. With a flair for narrative detail, Xing Yu Liu continues to venture into other fields, especially in their latest work in the series About Secrets About Inside.
About Secrets About Inside
About Secrets About Inside is a striking series that unearths stories about injury and transformation. Through evocative black and white, the work captures how subtle physical and emotional scars affect identity. Comparing nature and artifice, the artist juxtaposes the organic growth of tremella fungus in a crack with the unyielding brightness of fake winter jasmine, a metaphor for wounds that heal yet never indeed vanish. Through analysis of the unspoken aftermath of surgery or the mutual vulnerabilities of love, this series invites the audience to really ponder and think on the permanent, often unseen, imprints left by experiences.
Winter Jasmine depicts artificial blossoms in black and white, exploring the relationship between nature and artifice. This plastic version of a flower symbolic of spring in China neither wilts nor truly blooms, existing in a perpetual state that defies natural cycles. By referencing the legacy of still-life photography, the artist transforms these synthetic flowers into a meditation on permanence, authenticity, and striving show beauty.
The monotone palette intensifies this dissonance. Stripped of their usual sunny hue, the blooms become sculptural forms, recalling Robert Mapplethorpe’s fascination with texture while subverting Imogen Cunningham’s devotion to living flora. The artist’s deliberate removal of colour underlines how these blossoms are mere simulations, highlighting our collective fixation on preserving appearances over than welcoming the ephemeral processes that define evolution, transformation, and decay.
By adopting a beloved Chinese emblem of renewal and freezing it in plastic, Winter Jasmine questions the trade-offs between lasting perfection and the lustre of natural life. Like conceptual works by Ai Weiwei, it probes cultural identity, mass production, and humanity’s uneasy coexistence with pure nature. The resulting image stands as a ingenious critique of the desire to control time and transform impermanence into a timeless, idealized, eternal bloom.
After Gynaecological Surgery presents an intimate black-and-white photograph that highlights a woman’s midsection, subtly revealing the remnants of a medical procedure. This seemingly simple frame resonates with a deintense emotional weight, confronting the viewer with a taboo that is often glossed over—women’s scars, physical and psychological. The hand placed protectively over the abdomen evokes the vulnerability of post-surgical recovery, echoing the quiet pain and powerful resilience that follow life-altering events.
In many cultures, women’s wounds, whether from childbirth or surgery, are further shrouded in silence, a source of misplaced shame rather than recognition of strength. The photograph’s stark monochrome underscores the permanence of these marks, demonstrating that while skin may heal, it never returns to a state of pure, unmarked innocence. This strong aesthetic choice draws comparisons to the work of Jo Spence, who famously used photography to depict the intricacies of illness, and body identity.
By exposing the visceral truth of post-surgical scars, After Gynaecological Surgery simply asks you, the viewer to reframe how we perceive and speak about trauma. It invites empathy, urging a collective acknowledgement of wounds and the stories they tell.
