GALERIE VOSS

Lyu Yanxiang | Distant Nearness
Aug 29, 2026 - Oct 17, 2026

Curated by Heinz-Norbert Jocks When people speak of contemporary Chinese art today, the international art media has largely focused on names such as Ai Weiwei and Cao Fei. Exhibitions such as Magiciens de la Terre in 1989, the 1999 Venice Biennale, documenta 12, and Art and China after 1989: Theater of the World at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in 2017 have played an important role in shaping the international reception and canonisation of particular generations of Chinese artists. Very recent Chinese contemporary art, by contrast, remains largely overlooked in Europe. When it does enter the European discourse, attention often turns to artists living in the diaspora whose practices move between Chinese and Western artistic contexts, such as Wei Libo, Liang Fu, Fu Site, Li Donglu and Xie Lei. By contrast, a younger generation of artists living and working in China remains largely absent from the international map of contemporary art. One exception, and one of the younger Chinese artists to have achieved significant international recognition, is the photographer Ren Hang (1987–2017), whose photographs, often dealing with nudity, sexuality and gender, as well as the circumstances of his early death, have strongly influenced the reception of his work. Yet such biographical and thematic labels can also narrow our view, directing attention towards individual biography and immediately recognisable representations of the body and queerness. Less attention is paid to the emerging practices of artists living in China who are developing their own, often more indirect, visual languages. Yet contemporary art in China operates within a complex field of artistic interstices: between individual experience and social expectations, personal freedom and public visibility, Chinese traditions and global art history. It is precisely these interstices that often remain invisible to the European gaze. Here, the work of younger artists resists clear-cut categories and articulates its questions through detours, shifts, allusions and personal experience. It need not be loud or immediately confrontational in order to reflect the realities of contemporary society. This is where Distant Nearness at Galerie Voss comes in. With Lyu Yanxiang—born in Dalian in 1984, trained at the China Academy of Art in Hangzhou, and now living and working in Beijing—the gallery presents an artist who has already established a distinctive position in China but remains largely unknown to European audiences. This is his first solo exhibition in Europe. For Lyu, everything begins with a seemingly simple yet existential question: “Who am I?” His painting, however, quickly moves from the self towards the other: towards identity, desire, intimacy, distance, and the question of how we can perceive another person at all. What began as individual figures gradually developed into pairs and groups. People observe one another, mirror one another, desire one another, depend upon one another, and yet remain strangers. The personal thus becomes a question of human coexistence. Lyu is interested not only in his own identity, but increasingly in the relationships between people. His figures constantly oscillate between closeness and distance. They may look at one another and yet fail to truly encounter each other; they may desire one another and yet remain separated. In Lyu’s work, relationships become a form of reflection: in looking at the other, one inevitably encounters oneself. His images are therefore never simply portraits of individuals, but explorations of how identity emerges in the first place—in relation to others, through their gaze, and through the roles we assume in life. Lyu does not tell unambiguous stories. His paintings resemble film stills or theatrical sets: water, reflections, swimming pools, doors, landscapes and sunsets become open stages for psychological states. His figures are often caught in moments of waiting, contemplation or desire. They seem to possess a story that is never fully revealed to the viewer. It is precisely this openness that creates the tension within his paintings. His visual worlds emerge through a long process of collecting, remembering and connecting. His process draws on his own photographs, sketches, memories, travel experiences and spontaneous ideas, which he combines with motifs drawn from art history, literature, film and mythology. Caravaggio, classical painting and Impressionism encounter Chinese symbols and personal experience. Familiar visual motifs are shifted and reinterpreted. The resulting images appear both familiar and strange: we recognise something, yet can no longer determine its meaning with certainty. This becomes particularly apparent in Lyu’s engagement with queerness. Lyu identifies as a queer artist, but does not reduce his painting to questions of queerness alone. Instead, queerness often emerges through allusion, displacement and indirect reference. The mandarin duck, for example, is a traditional Chinese symbol associated with romantic love and marital harmony. In Lyu’s work, the motif is transformed into an image of two men. A familiar Chinese symbol thus acquires a new meaning that is at once personal and social. In Narcissus (2023), reflection becomes the starting point for questions of self-image, desire and our relationship to the other. Looking at one’s own reflection becomes a question of who the other is—and whether we can truly recognise them at all. For Lyu, what matters is not the definition of identity, but its fluidity. A person assumes different roles, is perceived differently by others, and shifts their position according to the situation. This is a central dimension of Lyu’s painting: the individual is never entirely isolated, but always embedded in a web of gazes, expectations, relationships and memories. This is precisely what makes Lyu’s work of particular interest to European audiences. He explores questions that also preoccupy contemporary art in Europe and North America—the body, identity, intimacy, desire, gender and freedom—but approaches them from a contemporary Chinese perspective. His art relies less on direct confrontation than on suggestion, irony, displacement and visual detours. This indirect visual language reveals that contemporary art in China does not exist solely within familiar political or socially critical categories. Lyu’s painting operates within those interstices in which younger Chinese art is developing today: between personal experience and social reality, between Chinese tradition and global art history, and between individual freedom and the expectations of one’s surroundings. The fact that these interstices are so rarely recognised in Europe points to a significant blind spot in the way contemporary Chinese art is perceived. Lyu demonstrates that an independent, complex and by no means easily categorised visual language has emerged within this context. Distant Nearness therefore does not simply seek to introduce another Chinese artist to Germany. Rather, it aims to broaden the European view towards a generation that has long since developed its own questions and visual worlds. Lyu Yanxiang is exemplary of this generation: his painting begins with the self and repeatedly leads back to the other—to closeness and distance, desire and vulnerability, self-assertion and the longing for connection. It is precisely here that the relevance of his work lies, particularly for European audiences. His paintings speak of experiences that may be familiar to us, yet do so from a perspective that remains largely unfamiliar. The exhibition is curated by Heinz-Norbert Jocks, an art critic, author and curator, as well as a correspondent for KUNSTFORUM International. For more than two decades, he has engaged closely with contemporary Chinese art and has taught at institutions including the Tianjin Academy of Fine Arts, the China Academy of Art in Hangzhou and Wuhan University. In 2018, he co-curated the double exhibition Langsame Heimkehr in Düsseldorf with Alain Bieber and Gregor Jansen—the world’s first comprehensive retrospective of Liu Xiaodong. Presented jointly by Kunsthalle Düsseldorf and NRW-Forum Düsseldorf, the exhibition brought together works spanning more than three decades of Liu Xiaodong’s practice. Jocks’ longstanding engagement with the Chinese art scene makes him an important bridge between artistic developments in China and their reception in Europe.