Lyn Liu
Mocking Game

The Breeder is pleased to present for the first time in Greece a solo show by the upcoming New York based painter, Lyn Liu (b. 1993, China), titled Mocking Game.

Drawing from her personal experience of dislocation, Lyn Liu creates a universe of symbolic, often absurd images reflecting on everyday situations through a cinematic lens. In her works reality seems like a sequence of freeze frames depicting the inner psychological landscape of the individual and at the same time the social realm emphasizing on the tensions between the two as well as internally.

For her show at The Breeder, Lyn Liu explores the conceptual dipoles of individual and collective, subject and object, alienation and assimilation through nine pairs of paintings. In each pair one work is centered around the idea of the subject, the entity capable of generating experiences and perceptions and the other one around the object, the entity influenced by the subject.

Lyn Liu contemplates on the effect of self-alienation apparent when someone find themselves in an unfamiliar environment as a means to regain their place and meaning, to re-subjectify themselves or as a form of resistance through which individuals can maintain their uniqueness. The title Mocking Game comes from the combination of Mockingbird and Game, reflecting the sarcastic nature of mimicry as a learning process for Mockingbirds and the opposition between two sides, the contrast between two paintings where the subject gazes at the object and the object imitates the subject. The process of painting is also reminiscent of “mocking game,” in which Liu establishes a language in the first painting and subsequently strives to replicate it in the second one.

In the pair “Interposition,” Liu presents an instance of proactive disruption/intervention in a pre-existing order. A person’s act, such as stepping between a pair of shoes, disrupts their previously unquestionable bond. In the second painting, an instance of receiving an action is narrated as the protagonist is passively pushed into a niche by an invisible agent. Similarly in the pair “Encounter,” a ballroom set for a formal dinner is presented, where each chair deliberately faces the chair from the nearby table, resembling a blind trust game where both chairs have made the same decision. In contrast, the second painting depicts quail eggs and a goldfish coexisting—two entities that wouldn’t naturally encounter each other but are sealed together in the same plastic bag, creating a forced encounter.

Lyn Liu was born in Beijing, China, and is based in New York. Liu works primarily in painting, printmaking, and independent publications. She received her MFA from School of the Arts, Columbia University, New York, in 2022, and her BFA from the School of Visual Arts, New York, in 2016. Liu also attended École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, Paris, from 2017 to 2020. Her first solo exhibition with Kasmin gallery, NY, Dogville, was mounted in 2022.