When I stepped into Vision London’s Soho gallery, my first encounter with Lucy XC Liu’s newest body of work, Veilings(2025), was almost disorienting because of its softness. On wrinkled, translucent silks, Liu paints in gradients that recall twilight skies and spring landscapes. Brushstrokes of violet dissolve into rich and layered blues. Coral and rose emerge as subtle undertones before intensifying to take over sections of the composition. Chartreuse darkens into folds of emerald, layered by snowy white. When the silks shift with the airflow, the space seems to breathe. Light passes through the folds and tints the walls. The colours extend beyond the works, both anchored and floating. In this sense, Veilings feels time-based. It is always in response to the light conditions and the viewer’s movement.
Then, I noticed the sharp sculptures pushing against this softness. The silk paintings are held in place by slender arcs of sharpened metal, curled and welded into forms reminiscent of thorns or animal claws. Some are gilded, others are meticulously oil-painted and glazed in colours drawn from nature. The metallic lustre and crisp lines introduce a harsh element. I wanted to draw closer to study the intricate details, but reminded myself in time to keep a safe distance. The silks, stretched taut across these jagged forms, seemed to be coaxed into motion. Their final posture is a result of negotiation with the structures that threatened to tear them apart. This interplay between fragility and force gives the work emotional complexity.
This tactile process, which conceals danger with ephemeral beauty, is essential to interpreting Veilings. Softness is not equivalent to passivity, and sharpness is not simply aggression. I think of Glissant’s concept of Opacity when observing how Liu probes the boundaries between what’s visible and what’s hidden, challenging viewers to shift their perspectives and embrace translucency. Abstraction becomes an evocative way of approaching things that are difficult to articulate, both on a personal and cultural level. Liu lingers in this threshold space, where fragility is not a weakness, but a deliberate and open presence.
A lineage of artists has used textiles to soften and disrupt the white cube, exemplified by Sam Gilliam’s draped canvases and Ernesto Neto’s sensorial environments. Veilings distinguishes itself through a quiet poetics and traditional Chinese colour palette. The work does not overstate. Instead, it invites viewers to slow down and dwell in its subtleties, creating a meditative experience.
Liu’s works, The Dream That Flocks South (2021), Thither Thither (2024), and now Veilings (2025) form a continuation that illustrates different facets of her core questions. She works fluidly across sculpture, video, performance, literature, and music, weaving together analytic, theatrical, and poetic registers. She repeatedly returns to the revelation of beauty and the concealment of destruction, where delicate materials hold together to convey vulnerability as a form of resistance. These works invite viewers into uncertainty and instability, allowing them to confront their affective potential.
In her artist film Thither Thither, Liu portrays a ghost lady drifting through the wilderness, singing as she searches for her lover. The viewer sees the world through the eyes of a spirit condemned to endless migration. Drawing inspiration from the Greek myth of Orpheus and Roland Barthes’ A Lover’s Discourse, she conveys the coldness of her journey through mystic landscapes, with no hope of arrival. Liu covers the lens with thin silk that quivers in the wind, like veils in both a literal and metaphorical sense. She describes them as portals “for the realms on two sides to haunt each other.”
Her solo exhibition The Dream That Flocks South is a performance within an immersive sculpture. She transformed the once-banned 18th-century Chinese novel, The Dream of the Red Chamber, into pulp and handmade nearly 100 square meters of paper, covering the gallery floor and suspended in dreamy shapes from the ceiling. At the exhibition opening, she performed the Kunqu Opera classic “The Peony Pavilion” (1598), a story entwined with the novel in its themes of dreams, love, and loss. She invited the audience to tread on the paper, soiling and tearing it. This gesture enacts public complicity in cultural erasure, staging grief and resilience simultaneously.
In all these works, materials are the grammar of Liu’s metaphors. In Veilings, she demonstrates growing mastery of translating poetics into physical tension. Having established a complex thematic foundation, she speaks of vulnerability and displacement without resorting to topicality, and is refining her language and craft that will continue to unfold. Her work reminds us that art doesn’t need to be loud. Sometimes the most resonant gestures are soft and gentle.
