Raymond Pettibon: Th Explosiyv Shoyrt T

Cantor Arts Center, Stanford University, Palo Alto, California, August 21, 2024–February 23, 2025

At Stanford’s Cantor Arts Center, Livien Yin’s exhibition “Livien Yin: Thirsty” (on view August 21, 2024–February 23, 2025) is an intimate, single-gallery show in the Ruth Levison Halperin Gallery and marked Yin’s first solo museum exhibition. The exhibition brought together new and recent paintings shaped by a research-driven practice: Yin stages luminous, fictional vignettes—often casting friends as models—to collapse past and present and draw connective threads between contemporary life and historical Asian American figures and environments. A central historical anchor is the story of Chinese “paper sons and daughters” during the Chinese Exclusion Act era; Yin draws from historic photographs while using the absences and gaps in the archival record as a productive space to imagine possible realities

I’m also drawn to her formal style which evokes for me a sort of paint-by-numbers vibe (I mean this in the best, most complementary way), where local color shifts are not smoothed together in their modelling but are stepped like layers.

https://livienyin.com/
https://museum.stanford.edu/exhibitions/livien-yin-thirsty
https://lahstalon.org/at-the-cantor-spirit-house-and-livien-yin-explore-asian-american-identity/

Gagosian Gallery, New York, January 12–February 18, 2012