Xuanlin Ye

Xuanlin Ye’s painting practice combines color, texture, and form in works that explore how images convey time, memory, and place. Working with photo transfer and cyanotype alongside painting, he layers and occludes imagery drawn from tomb culture, mystic narratives, cosmic signs, and fleeting natural phenomena. These sources are not presented illustratively. Instead, they are sedimented into fields of marks and color where legibility is deliberately unsettled. The result is a visual language that withholds fixed readings while sustaining a sense of accumulation—meanings pressed into the surface and then partly veiled by subsequent gestures.

Richly layered tableaus, rendered in an often vivid color palette and expressive brushstrokes, fill the canvases of Xuanlin Ye in an almost horror vacui manner, achieving a consistent high-density of visual stimuli and information. A recurring concern is the reconfiguration of Chinese notions of time and space. Ye treats the picture plane as a site where different temporalities meet: archival remnants, symbolic motifs, and immediate painterly acts coexist. Cyanotype and transfer processes fix images through light and chemical reaction, embedding photographic traces into the substrate; subsequent painting introduces ambiguity, interference, and reinterpretation. The paintings, therefore, speak in a vocabulary of palimpsest—syntax and semantics accruing over time and then being blurred, scraped, or flooded by color. Ye characterizes this as drawing out thoughts that resist articulation, an embrace of memory that loosens the boundaries of the self.

From koi fish in water to threatening red seas, and from still lifes to everyday elements. Rather than depicting the subjects straightforwardly or traditionally, the works construct an internal cosmos in which these elements circulate and recombine. Surfaces appear charged, cracked open, and in flux, as if capturing a moment before differentiation settles. Within these fields, images of bamboo and lotus appear as intermittent shadows. They are not central emblems so much as echoes: delicate, recurring silhouettes that move through zones of fluorescent color and shifting marks. Their presence signals an attachment to home and a warmth associated with origin. Yet, the artist frames them as unstable and rugged, holding them in place—memories that flicker and do not resolve into a single, definitive sign.

Xuanlin Ye, Have a boat ride with me to the peach blossom spring, 2025. Oil on canvas — 50 x 70 in. Courtesy of the artist.

Xuanlin Ye, Aubade of Sunken Flower Vase, 2022/2023. Acrylic on canvas — 12 x 12 in. Courtesy of the artist.

Xuanlin Ye, Jade Koi, 2025. Airbrush on cyanotyped canvas — 72 x 48 in. Courtesy of the artist.

Xuanlin Ye, Untitled, 2025. Oil and ink on canvas — 70 x 48 in. Courtesy of the artist.

Xuanlin Ye, Sometimes I call your name in silence, 2025. Oil and ink on canvas — 60 x 72 in. Courtesy of the artist.

Xuanlin Ye, You, who occupies thousands of empty valleys, 2025. Oil and ink on canvas — 80 x 58 in. Courtesy of the artist.

Xuanlin Ye, Lotus Club Party, 2022/2023. Acrylic on photo transfered surface — 12 x 9 in. Courtesy of the artist.

 

 

This visual framework directly connects to Ye’s stated focus on the diasporic experience. The paintings consider the meeting point between a self formed across geographies and a set of persistent spiritual and emotional currents—memory of family, place, belief, and the broader universe of inherited imagery. The compositions are populated by culturally encoded forms and by lines and shapes that register the self-questioning that accompanies distance and recollection. The works acknowledge an ongoing tension between an originating root and a life now lived in the United States, and they articulate that tension without resolving it. The recurring pulse of bamboo within the pictorial space is the artist’s image for that condition: steady, interior, and felt rather than diagrammed.

Ye’s methods reinforce these themes. Photo transfer and cyanotype anchor images through processes that themselves rely on exposure, time, and erasure. Painting then overlays these anchors with surfaces that “splash,” “cavort,” and cross boundaries, in the artist’s terms, to complicate or even obscure what has been fixed. The interaction between procedural imprint and painterly excess generates the works’ characteristic push–pull: forms emerge and recede; symbols register and then slip from view. Radiant hues intensify this unsettled visibility, establishing chromatic zones where shadows of bamboo and lotus can be sensed but not held in place for long. The works thus build their own atmospheres rather than simply gathering images; they create conditions under which memory and signification remain active but provisional.

The artist’s biography provides further orientation. Ye is based in Chicago and works as an educator as well as a studio practitioner. He received a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2017), an MFA from the Hoffberger School of Painting at the Maryland Institute College of Art (2020), and an MA in Art History from the University of Chicago (2022), where he completed his thesis with art historian Wu Hung. He is an adjunct professor of art at Roosevelt University. His recognitions include the Hoffberger Fellowship, the Soho Fellowship, and the Longform Award from Ox-Bow School of Art. Exhibition history spans New York City, Baltimore, Chicago, San Diego, Dallas, and Seoul, with institutional presentations at places such as the Chinese American Museum of Chicago, Ox-Bow School of Art, Roots and Culture, the University of Chicago, the Czong Institute for Contemporary Art (CICA) in Korea, and Valencia College Orlando. Publications have featured his work, including New American Paintings and China’s Wenzhou Daily Newspaper.

For more information, please consult the artist’s website here.

Last Updated on October 8, 2025