The Space Between Skins: Wen Liu & Yesiyu Zhao

Opening Reception

Thursday April 9, 2026

From 6 to 8 pm

1923 S Santa Fe Ave, Los Angeles

In the Zhuangzi, one of the foundational texts of Taoism, there is a fable about a man who dreams he is a butterfly. Upon waking, he can no longer be certain of the boundary between his human form and the dream. Rather than resolve the question, he embraces the fluidity between both, embodying the same threshold that artists Yesiyu Zhao and Wen Liu have made the subject of their practices.

From afar, Yesiyu Zhao’s new body of work appears abstract in its approach to color, texture, and form. The paintings’ precise geometric shapes and monochrome color palettes evoke refracted water or glass illuminated by light. Yet despite their abstract appearance, Zhao describes this body of work as his most figural to date, illuminating the hidden figures that personify invisible energy exchanges between each of us.

Zhao’s work explores that which cannot be seen: the tangible atmosphere that exists beyond the visible field. The artist inscribes the body into the work, using the canvas as a diary for recording daily observations. Then, using a carving knife, he excavates pigment in segments, revealing geometric shapes beneath. Like paper cutting, each step of subtraction reveals a new layer of recollection.

This body of work takes inspiration from Chinese opera, in which performers wear intricately painted masks adorned with natural motifs such as butterflies. Each work in the series maps a different stage of metamorphosis: from the chaos of the chrysalis, through the precarious work of breaking out of the shell, to the rebirth moment when the subject ventures into the world, and finally to a state of being pulled in multiple directions at once, yet feeling settled amid the changing nature of the self. Of this philosophy, Zhao said, “Through color, shape, and the traces of my own gestures, the spaces in-between become the primary subjects. Ultimately, these physicalized frequencies serve to document the extreme fluidity of humanity.”

Where Zhao works outward from the body, tracing its movements and pushing against its limits, Wen Liu begins from within, sculpting the invisible architecture of pain and preservation. Liu’s mixed-media sculptures resemble bone structures, like the butterfly shape of two rounded halves coming together to form a pelvis. Their structures originate as Rorschach inkblots, which are turned into drawings, then painstakingly hand-sculpted from water- and oil-based clay before a mother mold is made to cast their shape. The original sculpture never survives, becoming a metaphor for a creature shedding its skin — something must be destroyed in order for something new to be created. 

The negative spaces between the bones are filled with a resin mixture containing Chinese herbal prescriptions. Liu began seeing a traditional Chinese medicine doctor to alleviate her health conditions, embedding each tincture into her sculptures to document her health throughout her life. These prescriptions reflect her ongoing struggle with the articulation of pain: “How well you can articulate your pain determines how accurate your diagnosis will be.” 

The process is regimented and unforgiving — each resin layer is poured in six-hour increments, and areas are sectioned off before new colors are added. The works call back to the ancient lost-wax casting process, in which a wax casing is burned away to reveal a hollow mold, and to archaeological practice, in which specimens are cast in amber resin for preservation and study. While the resulting sculptures carry futuristic and alien sensibilities, their symmetry insists on something human.

While Zhao’s approach conjures a spontaneous feeling that strives to articulate the intricate possibilities of exchange between individuals, Liu’s reflects a laborious exploration of slippages in expression over time in a search for patterns and codes that exist beyond language. Together, their practices trace a shared human condition, lingering, like Zhuangzi, in the interval between one form and the next.

—Sigourney Schultz