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Jiaqi Lyu graduated in 2025 from her Master of Fine Art at Goldsmiths University, London. In her work she examines the tension between an often-obscured past, suspended historical moments, and a promised future that remains unrealised. Her painting practice transforms archival materials, everyday objects, family histories, and intimate memories into ghostly presences, bridging multiple temporalities to create a space in which alternative forms of dialogue can emerge. Drawing on the visual language of Victorian spirit photography, her paintings employ a semi-photographic, semi-painterly approach to construct a phantom realm where everything oscillates between truth and falsehood, certainty and uncertainty, history and memory.
Her ongoing research is grounded in her experience of growing up in Northeast China and spending much of her young adulthood living abroad. Through this migratory bird-like position of distance and return, she revisits the historical and contemporary landscape of the region as a threefold borderland (a geographical, cultural, and historical frontier). Lyu focuses on investigating the condition of being marginalised and displaced, the gaps and omissions within authoritative, power-dominated historical narratives, as well as the moments when nostalgic recollection ceases to function. By conjuring the “ghosts” of history, her work reanimates a seemingly fossilised past, offering alternative ways of perceiving both the past and the present.
Her ongoing research is grounded in her experience of growing up in Northeast China and spending much of her young adulthood living abroad. Through this migratory bird-like position of distance and return, she revisits the historical and contemporary landscape of the region as a threefold borderland (a geographical, cultural, and historical frontier). Lyu focuses on investigating the condition of being marginalised and displaced, the gaps and omissions within authoritative, power-dominated historical narratives, as well as the moments when nostalgic recollection ceases to function. By conjuring the “ghosts” of history, her work reanimates a seemingly fossilised past, offering alternative ways of perceiving both the past and the present.
Works for sale on auction:
Hallucination of Ascending
2025
Oil on Canvas
20 x 30 cm
SOLD
A discharged soldier told my grandma
2025
Oil on Canvas
20 x 30 cm
SOLD
This body of work examines the history of China’s Four Pests Campaign of the 1950s an my grandmother’s recollection of her experience of the Korean War, focusing on the sparrow, a species long embedded in urban life of northern cities, and its mas extermination during the first state-led campaign. The spectral presence of sparrows is juxtaposed with archival imagery of B-29 bomber deployed in daylight bombing missions during the Korean War. Continuing my practice of mixing specific historical events with fragmented memories, I treat the sparrow as a recurring ghost. In Manchu shamanic traditions, sparrows ar understood as spiritual birds that summon back the lost spirits of children; here, they become agents that pierce the veil of time, reanimating histories that remain unspoken.
