Yutian Liu’s Slide from Recognition to Misidentification
by Tong Liu
"The exhibition names the grammar" is a statement that is grammatically correct but does not make sense in natural language. It reads like a collage of words with a simple structure but unknown meaning, where each unit of meaning is easily identifiable yet fails to convey a coherent message in our usual linguistic context. To understand it, we must place it in a context that defamiliarizes it, prompting us to consciously re-examine it.
This reading experience mirrors the experience of viewing Yutian Liu's work, oscillating between the recognizable and the empirically plausible.
Exhibition view of Grammar, free range, Chicago, 2024
In her recent solo show Grammar at free range, brightly colored flags create a flowing atmosphere within the compact space. In the Single Flag Studies series on the side walls, the flags appear in perhaps the least recognizable state of being flags—just stripes, two colors, and basic designs. An area within these basic geometric shapes is cut and then rotated or reversed, transforming them into new flag patterns or, rather, simply states of intervention, as suggested by the stitching along the moving edges.
In the diverse spatial variety of free range, the same intervention is seen evolving into a temporal system in Separating Flag in Panels at the center of the space, and proliferating into a series of repetitive juxtapositions in Navigation: Flags in Flux above the space. "Grammar is the set of rules by which signs are created, used, assembled, and transformed." It is clear to see how the grammar of works is produced in her actions.
Single Flag Study(Orange/Yellow Saltire), 2022, screen-printed stitched cotton, grommets
For the viewer, the grammar constructed by Yutian Liu in her works is generated in the opposite direction. The alterations to the patterns do not logically generate new meanings or dramatic consequences but instead turn back to the past, emphasizing the process of restoration during recognition, thus highlighting the actions that took place. Consequently, the actions are repeatedly experienced, becoming grammar through viewing. Results precede cognition, and occurrences precede induction, in the most natural and primal path of grammar generation.
Notably, there is a tension between the inherent grammar of flags and the new grammar established by the interventions. The elements forming patterns, the differences enabling recognition, the paths transmitting meanings, and the conventions suggesting the existence of signified are clear and familiar, inherently present in the category of "flags," as much as the force of gravity that causes the fabric to drape. However, the dislocation of this old grammar in the works deflects the associated recognition paths. To achieve valid viewing, the audience is invited to spontaneously establish a new grammar from the dislocated images and unfamiliar contexts. More importantly, this defamiliarized perspective is cast back onto the familiar grammar of flags as artificial symbols, creating oscillation that shakes the fixed frameworks, as well as the arbitrariness of symbolic references, the randomness of conventions, and the instability of conceptual identity wrapped within them.
Out of Line (Blue Single)+Monotype Matrix, 2022
NO-to-GO, 2024, gouache on paper
In the timeline of Yutian Liu's practice, an intriguing echo is formed between the initial work Out of Line and the latest series of paper-based works that return from flags.
Out of Line originated from Yutian Liu’s dream recording starting in 2022. A building is rising, but a small part within it remains in place. The movement here does not follow the functional structure of the building, nor does it trace a logically interpretable path, but rather generates splits in random positions in an absurd manner. As in her later works derived from this, the direction towards symbols, meaning, interpretation, and purpose seems deliberately obscured, losing its romanticized potential, and instead becomes a period of events without antecedents or subsequences.
If the later series of flag works were to be developed in reality by obtaining the action to intervene from the monotype of dream representation, then the latest series of paper works place Yutian Liu in the position of the dream maker herself. The first step is to detach from the imagination of the fabric, along with its material, spatial, and symbolic presuppositions. She returns to familiar painting to gain greater freedom. The works present as a series of motion slices of abstract shapes, while their titles still hint at their possible origins in daily experiences and their ongoing interaction with the symbolic system.
Cutting for Less, Cutting for More, 2022-2024, Raw canvas, screen-printed canvas, grommets, acrylic paint on window
As the previously mentioned works demonstrate, evolving systems have always been a crucial means for Yutian Liu to unfold processes, emphasize actions, and discuss contradictions. Another perspective of the exhibition at free range is the four windows facing the street, which offer another possibility for display and viewing. If you walk in two different directions outside the gallery, you'll see two different sets of evolving systems displayed in the outer windows because a cut-out part is visible from one side and missing from the other.
Cutting for Less, Cutting for More is built on such an exhibitionary trick. Ivory fabric transitions from having red stripes added to folding inward a small cut rectangle to the structure itself becoming a pattern on glass. The cognitive divergence occurs on the third flag. The abstract striped pattern constitutes the riddle in the real context, while the inferred possible American flag constitutes the riddle in the structure of the flag pattern. This dual interpretation sticks together to form the front and back of this work.
However, rather than suggesting that this duality and the contexts they unfold constitute the two fulcrums of Yutian Liu's work, it might be more accurate to say that she stands in between, simultaneously maintaining a conceptual distance from the patterned, compositional, and modernist, and a visual distance from the real, linguistic, and symbolic systems. Here, when we look back at her interventions in flags, windows, and viewing, we can clearly see the unifying in-betweenness of Cutting for Less, Cutting for More with the other works in the space, or rather the interspecificality. How does one thing get mistaken for another? How is one meaning misread as another? Fundamental differences become switches—the boundaries that define two distinct things, but in her practice, they also serve as passages. They may manifest as absurd, meaningless, or irrational, akin to the differences separating the two.
She concretizes this on the window as the cut-out void, connecting what the pattern once was and what it logically should be. Simultaneously, it acts as a sub-window, perhaps another passage set by Yutian Liu, a third possibility, with the solution hidden in the exhibition it reveals.
July 2024