EXHIBITION
26 OCTOBER – 2 NOVEMBER
Tues – Sat 1 – 6 PM
Sun 1 – 5 PM

 

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Yue Zhou is a contemporary artist working mainly with oil on canvas and acrylics. Her work draws from intuition, emotion and everyday perceptions, using cool tones, light, space and subtle colour relationships to construct psychological landscapes that lie between reality, memory and dreams. Through her paintwork, she reorganises these fragments, allowing reality to morph into a spiritual landscape situated between memory, dreams and imagination.

For Yue, painting is more than a depiction of the external world. It is a way of perceiving the world, organising experiences and responding to her inner self. In her works, subjects and scenes remain in a state of open narrative, inviting viewers to project their own memories and emotions during the viewing process, and to reconsider the subtle and fluid connections between humanity and the world.

Artworks

‘End of Rooms Series’, 2025-2026

In the series of oil paintings, End of Rooms, rooms serve as psychological spaces where memories, emotions and the experiences of others constantly intertwine. Through the layering of interior scenes, figures and landscapes, and the interplay between reality and imagination, she breaks down the original boundaries of space, causing familiar places to take on unstable and multifaceted appearances. The subtle traces left by daily life not only document an individual’s existence but also hint at those who once lived here yet have since departed.

The works thus pose the question: when different life experiences converge within the same space, to whom does the room truly belong? And where exactly are its boundaries? Here, space continually expands in tandem with memory, time and human migration, becoming a place where the past and the present, private experiences and the lives of others, are interwoven. The end of a room may not lie at the end of the walls, but rather in the ever-shifting nature of our understanding of belonging and existence.

‘Another Window’, 2025

I attempt to use the ‘picture-within-a-picture’ structure to restore painting to its original purpose: to open up an alternative way of viewing the world, rather than being a representation of it. When natural landscapes enter the painting and then the room, the boundary between reality and the image begins to blur. The light from outside the window illuminates the interior as well as the mountain landscape within the painting. The real space and the depicted space respond to one another, causing the gaze to shift back and forth between the two. Perhaps what we are truly gazing at is never the painting on the wall, but rather the other world we reach through it.

‘Indoor Weather’, 2025

Indoor Weather shifts the focus of climate from the natural environment to living spaces and the inner state of individuals. The work examines a form of ‘indoor climate’ that gradually emerges from prolonged indoor living. It is shaped by a combination of the physical conditions of the dwelling, the duration of residence, financial pressures and the individual’s psychological state.

The housing crisis is constantly reshaping urban lifestyles. When a person is forced to remain indoors for extended periods due to rent, spatial constraints or the cost of living, a home—which originally served as a place of rest and protection—may gradually transform into a confined psychological environment. Consequently, in this work, the indoor space also serves as a projection of psychological and social realities. As the external world is continually compressed, the human psyche begins to form its own weather. Housing is no longer merely a vessel for life, but has become a force that helps shape life itself. The work thus links individual psychological experiences to the broader issue of housing, prompting us to consider whether we are living within our rooms, or whether we are gradually being defined by them.

‘Before Becoming’, 2024

At every stage of life, before one truly becomes the person one will be in the future, every form of growth begins when one is still nobody. This work is an imagination of the future. The painting does not depict a real landscape; instead, it establishes a void between reality and dreams through the use of cool tones, allowing the figure to dwell in a time that has never been defined. This dwelling does nothing to delay, but prepares for what is to come. Before Becoming  intends to capture time that has begun to shape us, even though it has not yet unfolded.