Yin Zhaoyang: Hyde Park​

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Matthew Liu Fine Arts is honored to present Hyde Park, Yin Zhaoyang's latest solo exhibition. Drawing on more than three years of living in London, the exhibition takes the idea of the “onlooker” as its point of departure, tracing how life in an unfamiliar environment reshaped Yin's way of seeing and, in turn, his pictorial language. It is his first solo exhibition with the gallery since Yin Zhaoyang: New Works in 2016.

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Yin's painting has long been driven by the intensity of the subject: from the Cruel Youth paintings of the late 1990s, through the Myth and Frontal series, to the landscapes of Mount Song begun after 2011. His three years in London became an inverse experiment, withdrawing that forceful presence from the picture. Living beside Hyde Park in an unfamiliar linguistic and cultural environment, his daily routine gradually narrowed to a walk through grass, water, light, and strangers on the lawn. “I was a thorough onlooker,” he recalls. Observation here is not a posture but a condition: it determines both the distance from which the world is framed and the vantage point of this body of work.

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That condition also shaped the work's form. His Beijing studio is large; the London studio was small, and the paintings contracted with it. He first worked in fast-drying acrylic, returning to oil only after more than a year. With more limited means, the paintings had to resolve questions of looking, distance, and position within a reduced format. They rely less on mass and force than on framing.

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The park crowd is the exhibition's central motif. In Park—1 and Sunset Glow and Lake, figures are scattered across broad expanses of lawn and water—reading, lying back, taking the sun—each occupying a small, separate place. As Yin puts it, “it isn't lively.” The park has a long history as a subject in modern painting, from Seurat and Monet to Bonnard, yet Yin treats it differently. His figures are distant, small, turned away, and lightly brushed; their legibility is deliberately reduced, leaving color to carry much of the expression. Green forms the ground of these works: the strikingly clean green he encountered repeatedly in the park. In Woman on the Grass, the figure is pushed to the edge of the canvas, allowing emptiness itself to become the subject.

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A second group turns to lakes and mountains. The lake begins in the park but is repeatedly extended until it separates from direct observation. In Blue Lake, water and sky nearly dissolve into one still field of blue; the orange mountains and motionless water of Mountain and Lake are, in Yin's words, “invented.” Reality provides the starting point, while imagination completes the image. The two groups thus form a contrast: one rooted in daily experience, the other a distance that exists only on canvas.

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A third group comes from indoors. Yin used no models in London; his portraits draw on images from his phone, casual photographs, and art books. Buddha Head—2 derives from ancient Chinese sculpture, while Cubist Woman pays direct homage to Picasso. Unlike the figures he painted in Beijing, which remained close to bodily experience, these works address the image rather than the body. Their small scale, handling, and use of pigment also mark a brief exchange with the European painting tradition.

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Yin remains outside the crowd: he does not belong to the lawn, nor does he attempt to enter it. This unbridgeable distance made observation a fundamental condition of his London years and the starting point of these paintings. The everyday is encountered repeatedly but never fully entered. The works remain quiet, restrained, and unresolved; feeling is not narrated directly, but held in the space between people.

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Yin Zhaoyang was born in Nanyang, Henan Province, in 1970 and graduated from the Printmaking Department of the Central Academy of Fine Arts in 1996. His work has been exhibited at major institutions in China and abroad, including the Museum of Contemporary Art, Singapore (2025); Long Museum West Bund, Shanghai (2021); Castel Sant'Elmo, Naples (2018); Musée de Tahiti et des Îles, Polynesia (2015); Guangdong Museum of Art, Guangzhou (2010); National Museum of Fine Arts of Cuba, Havana (2009); Seoul Museum of Art (2007); Metropolitan Museum of Manila (2006); Kunstmuseum Bern, Switzerland (2005); CAFA Art Museum, Beijing (2004); and Beijing Art Museum (2001).