Linfei Liu

After The Sun began with the observation of a sunflower after flowering. As its head lowered and its petals folded inward, the familiar plant briefly resembled a jellyfish suspended in water.

The painting preserves both readings without fully resolving the image into either a flower or a marine creature. Through translucent layers of pigment on silk, the work explores how an ordinary natural form can shift through attention and imagination. It reflects a moment in which decline becomes transformation, allowing one world to quietly open into another.

A New World is a series of three paintings developed from fleeting visual associations found in everyday surroundings. A closed flower appears as a small duck, a piece of rain-soaked paper becomes a squid, while patches of sunlight fall across a glass surface where a bird dropping resembles the shape of a shell.

The paintings do not illustrate imagined creatures directly. Instead, they retain traces of the original objects so that observation and imagination can coexist. Numbering the works presents them as connected discoveries from the same emerging world—a place formed through attention to overlooked, unstable and easily forgotten details.

Small Encounters brings together three intimate paintings based on overlooked objects and natural fragments. A discarded translucent plastic bag resembles a stray dog, fallen plant forms become tiny slippers or mushrooms, and the inside of a split lotus seed reveals a small hidden figure.

Working at a small scale encourages close and careful viewing. These paintings treat pareidolia not as an illusion to be corrected, but as a personal way of encountering the world. Familiar materials remain recognisable while simultaneously opening into imagined lives and identities.

Among extends an earlier observation of a split lotus seed into a wider aquatic environment. Across the long horizontal surface, pale lotus-seed-like forms with eye-like centres gather and drift within deep blue water. Some remain distinct, while others are partially obscured by reflections and ripples, suggesting small beings attempting to hide by becoming part of their surroundings.

Blue iridescent pigment catches changing light, causing the forms to appear and recede as the viewer moves. The work explores concealment not as enclosure, but as a process of blending into a larger environment while preserving ambiguity between seeds, figures and aquatic organisms.

The Second Sky began with pieces of crumpled paper encountered near the surface of water, whose folded shapes briefly resembled birds. In the painting, the paper form remains visible in the lower-left area, while a realistically painted pigeon appears in the upper-right. Placing the accidental resemblance and the living bird within the same image allows the water’s surface to become a second sky.

The gold-leaf ripples were inspired by an image of a lake at dusk, when the surface appeared to glow with golden light. The contrast between fragile discarded paper, the living pigeon, blue water and reflected gold explores how attentive observation can transform an ordinary environment without completely removing its original reality.