Siyu’s practice moves across painting, sculpture and writing. She is drawn to crossing boundaries—between disciplines, cultures, and identities. Maybe it’s because she has often changed where she lives; she finds herself subconsciously chasing a state of not fully belonging.
Lately, she's been focused on adaptation and mimicry. She plays with the edges of mediums using Trompe-l'œil techniques. The pleasure of both making and viewing these illusions lies in the paradox: the eye is tricked, but the mind is aware. It’s the joy of perfect imitation—the strange delight of being deceived and not deceived at once. To achieve this effect, She treats the surface as a ground, and on top she lets forms form slowly. She likes this “covering”, not to hide but to integrate the essence. Coverage has become part of nature.
As young, we often found ourselves obsessed with what was truly real—what was eternal and unchanging. Was it something like the truths of science and mathematics? So a question came into her mind. Could it be that all notions of right and wrong shift with time, while the quality and sense of something is like the essence of truth—remains constant?
She let the message of each of her pieces unintentionally speaks some of her. The “her” she is not too sure about. She might be going through a constant performance, like how we perform a character in theater, she performs the main character under her narration. She feels she’s always searching for that sense of literariness within reality itself. The part that's driven by fate, like foreshadowing or a planted clue, often feels too deliberate to her. She constantly shifts the roles she plays, because she believes that beneath them all, what has never changed—that is her true, unacted self.
CONTACT
siyujulialei@gmail.com
Instagram: @siyuleisiyu