Yuri Yuan: Hide and Seek

About

Alexander Berggruen is pleased to present Yuri Yuan: Hide and Seek. This exhibition will open Wednesday, April 16, 2025 with a 5-7 pm reception at the gallery (1018 Madison Avenue, Floor 3, New York, NY). The gallery will host a public artist walk-through on May 10, 2025 at 2 pm. Alexander Berggruen will publish a forthcoming exhibition catalogue featuring the paintings in this exhibition and new essays about Yuan’s work.

Yuri Yuan’s landscape and interior paintings explore existential themes of longing and loss through ambiguous figure-ground relationships. While these themes could evoke melancholy, Yuan consistently offers a symbol of hope—often represented by light. Known for framing her work as either “looking in” or “looking out,” she deepens this concept in her solo exhibition Hide and Seek. True to her preference for open-ended narratives, Yuan leaves it uncertain whether her figures are hiding, seeking, or doing both simultaneously. Through visual symbolism, metaphor, and magical realism, she reveals how a subject’s surroundings can reflect internal psychological states.

Having lived in multiple major cities and now residing in New York City, Yuan is intimately familiar with the unique sense of disconnection that can arise in the midst of a crowd. Her depictions of urban solitude echo the works of George Bellows and Edward Hopper, artists known for capturing isolation and introspection in dense cityscapes. Yuan describes how living in New York can feel like playing a childhood game of hide and seek where one starts to fear they may never be found.

Yuan invites a viewer to engage in the search, crafting visual puzzles that reveal themselves only through close attention and shifting perspectives. In her deep blue twilight paintings, such as When You Are Found, imagery initially appears obscured. The alternating directions of her brushstrokes simultaneously conceal and unveil forms. Under the right lighting conditions and viewing angle, a seascape emerges. A lone figure sits in a boat; their flashlight serves as the primary light source. This interplay of hidden imagery is more than an artistic technique: it serves as a metaphor for the introspective search for meaning, where discovery depends on patience and perception. The title of the painting suggests that the seeker will eventually be found—perhaps by a viewer—reinforcing the dual nature of hiding and seeking.

Light and shadow play a crucial role in shaping the emotional atmosphere of Yuan’s work, enhancing the sense of searching as if illumination might suddenly reveal hidden truths. In A Quiet Morning, she employs vibrant colors reminiscent of Pierre Bonnard, using a palette more saturated than her usual style. The intensity of the color mirrors the piercing gaze of a figure looking directly at a viewer, marking another new approach for Yuan. In the bright morning light, the figure shields her eyes with her hand, peering through the canvas—mirroring the searching gaze of a viewer.

A recurring motif in Yuan’s work is the depiction of hands, emphasizing the act of creation and the artist’s role in shaping the world. This is particularly evident in Where the Light Ends, where the artist’s face is rendered as a simple blue contour while her hands are painted with realism. A spotlight illuminates the hands as they hold open a book on Belgian symbolism. Speaking about this work, Yuan stated, “This painting inverts the idea that the artwork comes to life through the artist; instead, the artist comes to life through art.” By shifting the focus away from the artist and onto the artwork itself, she reframes the conversation from identity politics to the artist as a maker.

Yuan continues this theme of artistic freedom in Song of the Nightingale. Drawing inspiration from the Chinese fable The Nightingale, she suggests that, like the bird that prevails through the power of its song, the artist triumphs through their ability to express and preserve their experience. The detailed wallpaper in this work, created using linocut prints, features symbolic elements: a real bird representing the true artist, a jeweled bird symbolizing the machine artist, a landscape depicting nature, and the facade of The Metropolitan Museum of Art standing in for the art world.

In Hide and Seek, Yuan celebrates the freedom art provides to obscure and reveal, allowing mystery to build while exposing hidden truths to those who look closely. She pushes the boundaries of the interplay between internal and external realities, with her figures embodying both the instinct to hide and the desire to be discovered. Just as her subjects exist in this liminal space, so too does a viewer—searching for meaning, connection, and revelation.

Yuri Yuan (b. 1996, Harbin, China) holds a Visual Arts MFA from Columbia University, New York, NY and a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL. Yuan was a recipient of the Helen Frankenthaler Scholarship at Columbia University in 2020, and Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grant in 2019, 2022, and 2024. She was an artist-in-residence at Silver Art Projects Residency. The artist’s work has been exhibited at Alexander Berggruen, NY; Make Room Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; Haverkampf Leistenschneider, Berlin, GE; and Galerie Rolando Anselmi, Rome, IT; among others. Her work is represented in the public collections of Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus, OH and The Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, CA. Yuan’s work has been featured in Forbes Magazine’s “30 Under 30,” The Brooklyn Rail, Sound and Vision Podcast, Galerie Magazine, and Refinery29, to name a few. She lives and works in Jersey City, NJ.

This is the artist’s third solo show with the gallery, following Yuri Yuan: Dark Dreams (September 7-October 12, 2022) and Yuri Yuan: River Flows in You (July 21-August 31, 2021) and her inclusion in the gallery’s booth at the Dallas Art Fair 2023 and the group show Levity (July 13-August 29, 2023).

This exhibition will run at Alexander Berggruen (1018 Madison Avenue, Floor 3) from April 16-May 14, 2025. For all inquiries, please contact the gallery at info@alexanderberggruen.com.