M HKA Ensembles

° 1979

Lives in Shanghai (CN), born in Shanghai (CN).

Liang Yue is a video artist and photographer. She grew up under Deng Xiaoping’s relatively stable (and prosperous) China in the ‘80s and ‘90s. She lives and works in Shanghai, the dynamic, ever-expanding metropolis that very often serves as the backdrop for her films and photographic series. She portrays not so much the city’s intense, overwhelming, aggressive and vibrant aspects, but rather the facets of stillness, isolation, transition and change she finds there. Quite often young people figure in the background. They wander about silently, waiting for something to happen, for something they don’t know. The films can be seen as a dreamy study of the individual’s relationship with his surroundings. Liang’s personal feelings are the starting point for her work. She describes making art as something instinctive, a natural part of her existence. The material she works with is the everyday world. She aspires to show fragments from daily life from unusual viewpoints and alternative modes of perception, not to criticize reality or escape from it, but to evoke emotions. Her video works are like chapters from an unlocked personal diary, daydreams of a young woman revealing powerful and personal feelings, tender and melancholic. Liang’s films do not tell a linear, clear story. They are as complex as life itself, intangible as the heavens. The stream of images invites viewers to immerse themselves in the atmosphere, in feelings, thoughts, memories, musings...