Meet the Artist: YaYa Yajie Liang Paints the Poetics of Ecology

YaYa Yajie Liang’s vibrant body of work defies genre. Incorporating both abstract and figurative elements into her practice, she creates organic forms that are at once soft and fluid, restless and unruly. This critical tension reflects the biological undercurrents that characterize her oeuvre as she challenges the binary of animate and inanimate. 

Liang’s earliest memories recall days spent outdoors, gazing at insects as they danced above the lake near her provincial hometown. Liang understands that the natural world exists in physical and conceptual symbiosis with the body. Within this framework, nature and the body are two intrinsic entities, locked in what she describes as constant metamorphosis and perceptual transformation. Through her expressive, biologically-charged work, Liang explores what it means to be human in an era of ecological fragility, inquiring how we may coexist with all organic forms, from animals, to elements, and even decay. Whitewall spoke with the Chinese-born, London-based artist, while exhibiting at NADA art fair in New York, about how her intuitive practice mediates ecological awareness, Chinese artistic traditions, and a deep engagement with the metamorphic temporality of the natural world. 

WW: Your work is described as both ecological and philosophical. How did your personal  journey lead you to engage with the climate crisis and ontological questions through painting? 

YAYA YAJIE LIANG: I think it all stems from my deep fascination with the constant metamorphosis and perceptual transformation of the body. My parents are both painters, and the way they think about life and living through their paintings has also been a great influence on me. I was born in a very small city in the middle of China, and in my earliest memories, our family used to go camping to the lakes and rivers on the outskirts of the city. Every weekend we would go fishing, or just sit by the water and  draw whatever caught our eye—branches dipping into the lake, insects hovering above the water, or just the way the light passed through the leaves. Those moments are quiet, observant, and  whimsical. That, I think, was the beginning of my deep affection for nature— it’s not something separate from us, but something we’re constantly in the midst of. 

“My parents are both painters, and the way they think about life and living through their paintings has also been a great influence on me,”

YaYa Yajie Liang

As I grew older, literature gave me another way to understand this connection. Writers such as Kafka or Borges allowed me to see nature not just in terms of beauty or peace, but as something multi-layered, unstable, and sometimes uncanny. This fits well with my experience of painting, where things are never static and forms seem to dissolve, merge and become something else. 

When I came to England, hiking became a way for me to continue this physical contact, especially  along the chalk cliffs by the sea. Walking along the coastline, you realise that the ground beneath  your feet is compressed from ancient life—fossils, minerals, shells. It’s humbling. You feel time stretching in both directions. There is something incredibly moving about this slowness and  transformation: how minerals become animals, how animals become stone, and how stone becomes soil for new life. 

This cyclical metamorphosis has really shaped the way I look at the body—not as a closed human subject, but as an open, ever-changing field of perception, something porous and always entangled with other living (and non-living) forms. Thus, when I paint, I often ask: what does it mean to be human in a moment of ecological fragility? How do we make room for kinship—not just with animals and plants, but with air, stone, water and even decay? 

These questions keep pulling me back to painting. I think painting, with its sensitivity to time,  material and gesture, gives me a way to feel these entanglements. Here, philosophy becomes tangible. 

The Meaning of “Becoming” in the Work of YaYa Yajie Liang

WW: You’ve said, “I am not painting a stone, but the process of becoming a stone.” Can you expand on how that notion of ‘becoming’ manifests in your materials and imagery? What does “becoming” mean in your work? 

YYL: When I say, ‘I am not painting a stone, but the process of becoming a stone,’ I’m not being poetic for the sake of being poetic; it’s the true experience I have when I paint. It’s not about depicting the outer surface of a thing, it’s about getting into its rhythm, its inner logic, even its silence. 

“It’s not about depicting the outer surface of a thing, it’s about getting into its rhythm, its inner logic, even its silence,”

YaYa Yajie Liang

For me, stones are not static. I don’t think of them as static objects just sitting there waiting to be depicted. I think of them as bodies with memories: compressed times, pressures, transformations.  When I was a kid, while my parents were painting, I used to pick up oddly shaped stones around the  lake. I would hold them in my hand for hours, trying to imagine how they were formed: were they once part of a mountain? Did they live underwater? How long did it take for them to become what  they are now? This curiosity has always been with me, not intellectually, but in the way I feel  physically when I paint.So when I say ‘become a stone,’ it’s not about mimicking its shape or texture. Rather, it’s about  letting go of the idea that I am separate from the stone. I try to imagine what it would feel like to  slow down the stone and stretch it through geological ages. 

In the studio, this often means allowing the paint to create a resistance or density. Instead of forcing the image, I follow it. Sometimes this means layering up to the point where the form disappears into something more ambiguous, almost as if the image is being buried, eroded or fossilised in real time. Materials play an important role in this. I often think of paint as having a will of its own: it seeps in,  spreads out, coagulates, and interrupts my creation. So I go with the flow. I try not to dominate the  process, because ‘becoming’ is not about control. It’s about opening up, about letting my body,  brushes and paints move together in an unknown direction. 

Sometimes I call this energy my ‘third hand,’ as Philip Guston says, the part of me that works outside of conscious awareness. It’s a way of perceiving that lets me know I’m not the only one working. The stone, or whatever the stone might become, is painting with me. 

A Site-Specific Mural at NADA Deepens the Artist’s Ecological Message

WW: The site-specific mural at NADA threads between your works like a connective tissue. How do you think spatial installation deepens the ecological message in your practice? 

YYL: The concept of ‘connective tissue’ really resonated with me because that’s how I’ve always felt about space. It’s not just what you walk through, but what you intertwine with. So when I create a mural or installation in a specific location, I’m not just extending my painting into the room, I’m trying to extend that sense of entanglement outward, so that the viewer feels what it means to be in the painting, not just looking at it. 

At NADA this time, I want the mural to be like a membrane, it’s soft, porous, and always in flux. It’s not a backdrop or a foil, but more like a threshold you cross, a space that breathes with the rest of the work. I want the viewer to feel like they are stepping into a slightly unstable space where  images reverberate across the surface and boundaries are blurred. 

“At NADA this time, I want the mural to be like a membrane, it’s soft, porous, and always in flux,”

YaYa Yajie Liang

I think the installation makes the ecological elements of my work more intuitive. It no longer just  shows interconnectedness, but interconnectedness from inside. The space itself becomes an ecological field, where human and non-human, image and object, viewer and artwork meet,  entangle and transform. As people move through the space, I want them to not just observe, but to feel that they are part of something bigger, uncertain, fragile and shared. For me, this is the true meaning of ecology, that not control or understanding, but deep, felt entanglement. 

The Influence of the British Countryside in YaYa Yajie Liang’s Visual Language

WW: How has walking the British countryside, especially along the Jurassic Coast, influenced  your visual language and sense of temporality? 

YYL: The White Cliffs of England hike really affected me a lot, it changed my perspective on time in a way. I still remember it as a very surreal moment when I was alone and it was so quiet around me  that I could hear the wind whipping over the cliffs, like breathing. There were strange patterns on  the rocks, like fossil ripples, tiny imprints of ancient creatures—and I suddenly realised that I was  walking in time. It wasn’t just that I was looking at the rocks, it was more like the rocks were pressing down on me, leaving some kind of mark. I began to imagine how minerals become living  things, and then living things become minerals. The line between the living and the non-living  began to blur. That’s when I realised that I wasn’t just standing on the earth, I was part of it. My body was also part of this long, slow story. This deep sense of time, everything is constantly changing, layering, eroding, and forming again really shapes the way I paint. I often work in layers, letting things appear and disappear, as if they were settling or disintegrating over time. The images don’t always appear in recognizable forms because I’m not interested in a fixed identity. I prefer the feeling of being in flux, a sense of being in the making. 

“The White Cliffs of England hike really affected me a lot, it changed my perspective on time in a way,”

YaYa Yajie Liang

I think what I’ve learnt from these cliffhangers is that time doesn’t just move forward in a straight  line. It loops, it sinks, it wanders. I try to bring that slowness and whimsy into my work – to give the  sense that everything is interconnected in a river of time, and that nothing, not even the rocks, are  truly static. 

The Artist’s Organic, Fluid, and Scientific Process

WW: Your paintings resonate with the idea of the Wunderkammer, but with a more intuitive,  anti-classificatory approach. Can you talk about the relationship between collecting, intuition, and meaning in your process? 

YYL: The idea of a ‘Wunderkammer’ does coincide with me, but the way I collect things is definitely  more intuitive than systematic. Growing up, I was always picking things up: tiny bones, dried  leaves, sea-eroded pebbles, shards of sparkling mica found in the dirt. My parents used to joke that I was building my own little museum of natural curiosities. But to me, these things were never just  decorations or curiosities; they felt alive to me, like they held stories I couldn’t name but could  relate to. Looking back, I think that was my first collaboration with the non-human world. 

I still do that now. I’ll be walking along the coastline, or even just through the city, and something  will catch my eye, not because it’s beautiful in any traditional sense, but because it’s humming with  a certain quiet insistence. A porous bone, a bunch of dried seaweed, an oddly shaped rock. I never  go looking for these things with a plan more like……they call to me. They ask to be carried. When  I bring them back to my studio I don’t try to copy them or use them as reference material. I let them  exist, I let them be. Sometimes I put them near my paintings and just sit with them. The way they  carry time, their fragility, their erosion, their texture, begins to seep into the movement of my hand  or the layers of my paint. They are not symbols. They are more like frequencies that I regulate. 

In this sense, my “cupboards” are very different from the historical “Wunderkammer”, which often  attempted to catalogue and present the world in a colonial, controlling way. My ‘cupboard’ is more  like a little chaos zone, full of fragments and unfinished ideas. It’s a way of touching the infinite,  through something very small and concrete. 

WW: There’s a palpable fluidity between figuration and abstraction in your works. How do you decide what forms to reveal and which to let dissolve? 

YYL: This fluidity between figuration and abstraction is not something I plan in advance, but happens during the creative process. I see paintings as living organisms and I try to follow wherever it wants to go. Sometimes a shape starts to look like a figure and then it slips away. I’m more interested in that in-between state where things are forming and dissolving at the same time. I don’t really think  in terms of revealing or hiding forms. It’s more about allowing my body to respond to the material and trusting in what I call the “third hand” —that part of the process that transcends conscious control. I guess I’m trying to create a space where boundaries are blurred and things remain open, a world where boundaries are constantly being generated and dissolved. 

“I see paintings as living organisms and I try to follow wherever it wants to go,”

YaYa Yajie Liang

WW: You draw from marine biology and prehistoric life. Are there specific species, ecosystems, or scientific discoveries that have been especially formative for your recent works?

YYL: I’ve always been fascinated by marine biology and prehistoric organisms, not really from a scientific or taxonomic point of view, but what they represent. They’re about deep time, constant change, and how different life forms are entwined on a scale we can’t quite grasp. 

I wouldn’t say that a particular species shapes my work, but I do have a strange obsession with  things like porous skeletons shaped by seawater. I pick them up on walks near the coast—they’re both soft and fragile, and you can feel them being altered by years of water, salt and pressure. They’re not just objects, they’re tiny fossils of movement, erosion and memory. 

I was also impressed by the underground mycelial networks in the forest. I like the idea that there is  a hidden system beneath our feet, quiet, ancient, and completely alive, that connects everything. I  think this sense of slow, non-human intelligence also permeates my thinking about painting. I once read an article about a mushroom hunter who was infected by a fungus—a fungus that usually lives only in roses. For the first time it somehow made its way into a human host. It blew my mind. It made me think about how loose the boundaries are between species, and how we are never really separate from what’s around us. That idea, that we’re already entangled, even if we don’t notice, is  the main driving force behind my work. 

Multifaceted Influences and Evolutions 

WW: You incorporate Chinese artistic traditions with contemporary frameworks. How do these multiple influences interact and evolve within your studio practice? 

YYL: This combination of Chinese tradition and modern concepts is not something I deliberately try to balance. It is more like my inner world. I grew up learning traditional Chinese painting skills, many of which still influence the way I move in the studio, such as the way I hold my brush, the way I think in terms of flow rather than outlining, or how empty space carries as much weight as what is being painted. 

But what really influences me is the Daoist way of thinking. There is a Daoist idea that the world is always in a state of “becoming,” that everything is changing, dissolving, and reshaping, and that there are no hard and fast boundaries between things. This is exactly how I feel when I paint. I don’t try to capture a fixed image or express a fixed self. I’m more interested in what happens when you let go of control and let the work unfold, like water finding its way around a stone. 

“What really influences me is the Daoist way of thinking,”

YaYa Yajie Liang

In my studio, these influences don’t clash, but rather merge with each other. I might be thinking about Deleuze or deep time while working with a gesture that is completely rooted in the rhythms I learnt from Song dynasty painting. This is not a dichotomy between East and West, or old and new. It is more like a slow entanglement where different times, bodies and ideas meet in the process of painting. 

WW: Much of your work explores impermanence and future fossilization. Do you see your paintings as archival, prophetic, or something else entirely? 

YYL: I don’t really see my paintings as archival or prophetic. They are neither meant to preserve anything nor to prophesy. For me, they are more like……living chaos. In these spaces things are constantly changing and nothing is fixed. It’s more about keeping the tension between what is forming and what is disappearing. 

I like Borges’ novel “Aleph.” It is a point where all time and place exist at once. Sometimes I think my paintings are a bit like that. Not because they contain everything, but because they are open enough to let everything through. A little porous, a little broken, a little unfinished. So I guess painting, for me, is a way of confronting impermanence. I’m not trying to turn images into fossils, but perhaps painting itself is in the process of becoming fossilized, like traces of movement, of confusion, of care.