Modernity extols the power of reason, yet human nature tilts instinctively toward the irrational. Logic may appear ordered and lucid, but surging emotions and drifting transcendent impressions spill beyond its bounds. Transcendent impressions in particular arrive without warning, take root in ways that defy description, and spread of their own accord — leaving the inner world riddled with mystery, opaque even to the one who inhabits it.

For many years, Liu Guoyi has been visited repeatedly by strange dreams — haunting him through the night and shadowing him through the day — until these dreamscapes became an integral part of his waking life. So deeply and persistently have they marked him that he took to recording them as faithfully as he could through painting, sculpture, and other means. In the process, inevitable lapses of memory and spontaneous improvisation crept in, allowing recollection and inference, instinct and experience, to converge and intermingle. These recurring visions are the singular register of a body and mind finely attuned; the urgent need to give them form follows naturally. And so, from this inexhaustible stream of strange dreams, strange apparitions have continued to surface in Liu Guoyi's work — figures like spirits of the psyche, ordinarily invisible, yet now conjured vividly before the naked eye, startling us into awareness of the world's hidden depths and its dimensions we never thought to expect.
Text / Xiyun Du