Hongrui Liu’s (@hongruios) painting practice is grounded in the relationship between internal and external worlds, exercised through a visual language of translation. These structural frameworks; psychological, spatial, and cultural, form the true point of departure for each work. The internal, in this context, refers to a critical investigation of the conditions of identity shaped by memory, difference, and the entanglements of cultural history and lived experience. Each painting begins at the scale of the personal, the micro, and slowly extends outward, opening itself to broader collective resonances. It is within this process of expansion that the most intimate subjects emerge, distilled and rendered with emotional clarity.
Having grown up across multiple cultural environments, Shenzhen, Hong Kong, and London, Liu articulates cultural difference, ephemerality, and the psychological complexities of home and belonging. These experiences underpin a practice concerned with the traces of place, migration, and the transient nature of identity.
Visual translation becomes a critical mode of engagement, allowing Liu to articulate personal concerns that might echo social, collective conditions. The painterly surface itself, rubbed, washed, layered, erased and re-worked, becomes a site of negotiation, where his hybrid cultural identity is materially worked through. Each gesture is a kind of excavation, a trace and an attempt to make visible the layered and often contradictory experiences of living between worlds.
Liu allows space for the unconscious to participate in the making process. The underpainting phase, guided by intuition and affect, gives rise to suspended fields of colour, liminal zones from which forms and signs later emerge through a more conscious process of drawing. These visual elements often serve as conduits for personal memory and evoke atmospheres of belonging, dreamlike in tone yet grounded in lived experience.
The artist’s recent body of work, produced in London, continues this inquiry into the porous boundary between interiority and exteriority. These paintings take on a distinctly introspective character, drawing on Surrealist ideas of the dialogue between inner and outer psyche, while simultaneously engaging Homi K. Bhabha’s concept of the third space, a site of cultural hybridity and negotiation. Here, the urban environment becomes more than an industrial or architectural entity, it is reimagined as a psychological
topography, its architecture is shaped more so by memory, cause and effect. It is the visual translation of the unseen, connections of cause and effect between individuals, differences and similarities, that culminates into the urban environment, the city is a living organism, a live condition, that is shaped by and lived through by the individual-collective.
Despite themes of alienation and anonymity, the paintings speak to a shared urban condition. Liu translates the individual’s interior state into a topography of interconnectedness, where unseen emotional and historical layers surface within architectural or environmental forms. The city becomes a living, shifting matrix of psychological interactions, an intimate geography of belonging, estrangement, and transformation.
A recurring motif in Liu’s work is the window, a liminal image that encapsulates many of the artist’s preoccupations. The window is not merely a formal or architectural device, it is a psychological representation of the private, the homely. It is at once concealing and revealing. It offers an invitation for understanding differences, into the private, the intimate. It stands as metaphor for the layered meaning of home, and the internal landscapes one carries across geographies. These windows complicate and deepen narratives of identity and place. Often emerging unconsciously is the phantom presence of Hong Kong, Liu’s hometown, returns in these works. It is less a direct representation than an atmospheric memory, a dense vertical city surrounded by mountains and sea. This image of home haunts and interacts with Liu’s present-day environment in the UK and with impressions of other European cities encountered in travel.
In this way, each painting becomes a window of its own, an invitation to intimate recollection. Rather than assert a fixed narrative, Liu offers a space where the viewer might encounter their own sense of memory, loss, and belonging, sharing differences and similarities. The work stands as both a personal archive and a shared threshold, capturing the elusive yet deeply felt experience of living between cultures, between places, and between memories.
Hongrui Liu’s solo programme, Hyper Urban, will be on view at the Mall Galleries, London, from 26th–31st August, as part of FABLES | SWANFALL ART ANNUAL EXHIBITION 2025.
