Hive Center for Contemporary Art is honored to announce Lu Yu’s latest solo exhibition Mental Journey, opening on September 26, 2025, at Hive Shanghai’s main space. Following Sunnyside (2023), this will be the artist’s second solo exhibition with Hive, presenting nearly twenty new paintings. Continuing her exploration of pastoral aesthetics and the philosophy of the garden, Lu Yu constructs a spiritual realm nourished by both painting and nature. At the same time, she unfolds dreamscapes shaped by feminine sensibilities, weaving together personal inner journeys with images drawn from art history through distinctive compositions and perspectives. Curated by Zhao Xiaodan, the exhibition will run until November 4, 2025.

Lu Yu’s paintings refuse to be confined to singular symbols or linear narratives. Through the fragmentation, displacement, and reassembly of multiple images, she creates an aesthetic suspended between ambiguity and multiplicity. With the empathetic thinking and sharp perspective of a female artist, she revisits art historical motifs, dissolving established symbolic orders and releasing an intense emotional charge. If her 2024 work Europa marked a narrative shift in her practice, liberating the protagonist from passive roles in traditional narratives and instead emphasizing both animal docility and divine allure, then the prone angel connected to the motif of the “Great Bathers” intentionally weakens reciprocal gazes, fundamentally shifting mechanisms of viewing. The juxtaposition of peacocks and male figures, in turn, stands in stark contrast to the conventional “woman with parrot” trope of art history, traditionally loaded with erotic connotations. By reworking the theme of Luncheon on the Grass, Lu Yu no longer invokes external references but internalizes the narrative into a self-contained recognition of everyday life, thereby disrupting conventional pictorial storytelling and established modes of spectatorship.

Her painterly practice moves away from highly centralized visual anchoring, instead bending perception within a supple and measured atmosphere, endowing her figures with entirely different spiritual textures. Mental Journey unfolds along such narrative trajectories, expanding, interweaving, and diffusing, while pastoralism and its resonance with cosmic order provide critical coordinates, enabling her to reach a state of spiritual entropy reduction that resists the external chaos and inner tension emerging throughout growth. Meadows, pastures, and gardens become the foundations and soil for her embodied narratives and personal consciousness. The highly ordered pictorial landscapes she constructs mirror her lived experiences in reality, thus resisting the dissolution and collapse of ordered worlds. Consciousness continually departs from and returns to the stability of her compositional structures, always pointing toward an imagined Eden or utopia. Mental Journey illuminates her multiple selves navigating endlessly open thresholds, releasing a unique and expansive semantic field through figures, schemas, and nested spaces. Within shifting gazes and layered times, viewers merge with these mirrored selves, quietly entering the supple world she has woven, until absorbed without end.