Shuangyi Li’s paintings are imbued by a palpable stillness, as if the compositions draw out a singular scene across multiple viewpoints. Appearing to capture every season, seemingly frozen and foggy landscapes are met by a blooming trees, suggesting an ulterior atmosphere akin to the subconscious. Like a dream, her scenes ponder a world we can’t fully grasp, where characters enter and leave before absorbing into one.

She’s drawn to painters who similarly conjure suspense; Mark Rothko¹ with his potent fuzzy bands of colour looming over their viewers, Francis Bacon’s² expressive painting of a bull readying to charge and Edouard Vuillard’s³ portrait of his sister in which her ghostly body fuses to the distempered wallpaper behind. In Shuangyi’s she strives to occupy her paintings with hidden symbols. She finds solace in the paintings of Sanyu⁴ who spent much of his life in Paris and like Shuangyi left his homeland of China to study painting. Shuangyi and Sanyu both mystify the context of their paintings to enhance the sense of solitude for their central protagonists. The figures she chooses to paint are anonymous, their identity concealed as they’re depicted gazing into the landscape beyond⁵, or walking crestfallen.

The paintings in ‘When you know, you know’ reveal the linen surface beneath, Shuangyi using a dry application to develop an ecology of undercoats and layers. Rembrandt would apply this dry technique when painting hair, fabric and the textures of skin, but for Shuangyi, she applies it throughout her compositions, creating a textured effect reminiscent of subtle static. Each painting can be viewed like screens into unfolding dramas, where scenes merge under the continually evolving weight of her imagination.