Between Stillness and Resonance: The Art Philosophy of Yiting Liu

In the group exhibition Between Us, A Resonance: Stories of Cultural Memory, Community, and Belonging at EFA Gallery, New York City, from September 3rd to 12th, 2025, Yiting Liu presents a series of work that depicts an exploration and pursuit of the essence of human existence and soul. Her selected paintings—Whispering Moon, Silent Soul, No Title, No Title, and The Inner Order—emerge from two parallel series that Liu has been developing in recent years: a thread of self-portraits rooted in intimate emotion, and the larger Tianwen series, which investigates philosophical and rational inquiries into existence. 

Her most well-known artwork is Whispering Moon, Silent Soul, an oil painting that depicts a female figure, blurred like a memory, bending toward a lake, looking at the moon; it is a kind of portrait. Liu describes this as from her nightly habit of seeking the moon before sleep, a way of entering into a wordless dialogue with its calm, silvery presence. “The painting began with an image of a skull and antlers in a primeval forest, it is not that clear to see. Alongside a small hummingbird, I put many layers there, trying to transform it into a kind of self-portrait: a girl bending over the lake, gazing at her reflection, but only to find that what she retrieves is not her shadow, but the moon itself. Perhaps it reveals a tender part of me that is usually hidden deep inside. This process became the foundation of the work. The pale yellow, the dominant blue, and the figure draped in a sheer, carrying with them a quiet, cleansing softness.” This process of erasure and transformation mirrors Liu’s own method of inquiry, in which images are never fixed but constantly re-shaped, carrying traces of past visions. If the Tianwen series privileges restraint, Whispering Moon, Silent Soul embraces tenderness, giving form to what Liu calls “the softer part hidden deep within.”

As an artist and Guqin musician who blends traditional Chinese culture with contemporary visual art. Drawing inspiration from Pre-Qin literature, Chu culture, and classical music, her work explores themes of time, space, and existence. 

In a boon to contemporary painting, Liu’s sensitivity to rhythm, cadence, and pause has infused her canvases with the vitality of sound. Trained in music from a young age, she translates its sensibility into visual practice. Thanks to her mastery of the Guqin—a corner of ancient Chinese tradition that popularized the aesthetics of breath and resonance—her brushwork carries the weight of phrasing and silence. A new wave of “visual music” flows through her paintings, where strong and weak tones become fullness and emptiness, and pauses of breath open into spaces of painterly white. If AI is the economy’s steroid, then music is Liu’s: a force that sharpens her visual language into living rhythm.

Another series of work, No Title, No Title, and The Inner Order, belongs to Liu’s Tianwen series. The title borrows from the ancient Chinese text Tianwen, which means “Heavenly Questions”, a poem of cosmic inquiry. These paintings resist literal representation; they do not depict concrete objects but instead emerge from pure imagination. “To be honest, I try to avoid emotional excess here. Instead, focusing on the rhythm of brushwork, the balance of composition, and the interplay between freedom and control helps me convey the idea better.”

Some viewers perceive the Tianwen works as heavy or restrained, even oppressive. “To some extent, this is an intentional result of my process,” she explained. In this series, she consciously limits overt emotional expression in order to test the boundaries of painting as a rational language. When asked what Liu hopes her work offers to viewers, she thought for a while, “a space of stillness. Some audiences take my paintings as meditative, even spiritual, while others find them heavy. I accept these polarized responses as reflections of cultural background and aesthetic sensibility.”

Through Yiting Liu’s artwork, she invites us to dive into the inquiry of cosmetics, to listen, and to dwell for a moment in the space between stillness and resonance.