Yimiao Liu: Persistence of Vision

The rabbit in the painting Ask the Moon appropriates the composition from Chinese Parasol Tree (18th) by Leng Mei, a Chinese painter in the Qing Dynasty. In this piece, Mei introduced Western painting techniques, to depict two rabbits playing under a Chinese parasol on the occasion of the Mid-Autumn Festival, a yearly event to celebrate the full moon.

Conversely, In Yimiao’s rendition she uses contemporary Western painting materials such as oil, but applies them as if they were a traditional Chinese ink wash, light, airy and delicate. In doing this the artist creates a surreal and almost dream-like version of Mei’s pastoral scene, which is undercut by an acute violence as the lone rabbit is executed by thousands of arrows. Yimiao takes the romance, playfulness and innocence associated with the original image and pairs it with cruelty, emphasising the artists own irrational understanding of romance and longing, the pain and destruction that it comes with - “though pierced by ten thousand arrows, I showed my heart to the moon.” 

“I have always had an attachment to blue, as blue is to itself. It is the sky and the sea, a determined path forward, without looking back. I wanted to paint a ‘complete certainty.’”