Yuan Yuan: First U.S. Solo Show at Bortolami

Bortolami in Tribeca is presenting Yuan Yuan's first exhibition in the United States, installed in The Upstairs at 39 Walker Street and open through October 24, 2026.

Born in 1973 in Zhejiang, China, Yuan lives and works in Berlin. His exhibition history includes Qiao Space in Shanghai, XY Gallery in Guangzhou, Gropius Bau in Berlin, Edouard Malingue Gallery in Hong Kong, Yokohama Art Museum, White Rabbit Gallery in Sydney and the National Gallery of Indonesia in Jakarta. He has also taken part in the 12th Shanghai Biennial (2018), the 5th Chengdu Biennial (2011) and the First Nanjing Biennale (2010).

The new paintings follow his continuing interest in familiar images and places as they dissolve. Manmade landscapes, water and aquatic life blend with everyday urban Asian settings and Western art-historical imagery, producing detailed, dynamic and surreal scenes. Yuan works wet-on-wet, mixing finely worked passages with broad gestural strokes, so surfaces read as nearly liquid: forms gather, then melt back into color and light as you move closer.

Water runs through every canvas, seeping, spilling and dripping, and speeds the breakup of each imagined space. Several paintings show Japanese sento (public bathhouses) and onsen (hot springs and their pools) in states of decay, a subject Yuan has revisited for years. The ruined baths stand in for memories of communal life and how such ways of living change and vanish.

In Clack-Clack, a vintage Western beach scene appears as a mosaic inside an empty sento, joining two places of shared leisure and setting familiarity against distance. The triptych Driftscape layers pools of water and worn tile with forms recalling classical Chinese ink-painted pines, evoking wandering without a fixed bearing; pools are drained, branches overgrown and surfaces cracked and grimy. Slip combines a wet market with the composition of Pieter Bruegel the Elder's The Fall of the Rebel Angels (1562). Sea creatures tumble across the frame, and Yuan turns the sinful "fall" into a wet "slip", a reminder that slipping need not end in falling.

The gallery is open Tuesday to Saturday, 10 AM to 6 PM, and by appointment.