YaYa Yajie Liang, Falling Falling, 2025, Oil on canvas, 100 x 80 cm
Booth: A105
The Starrett-Lehigh Building
601 W 26th Street, 3rd Floor
New York, NY 10001
601 W 26th Street, 3rd Floor
New York, NY 10001
Cob is proud to present a new body of work by Chinese artist YaYa Yajie Liang, featuring a suite of oil on canvas paintings alongside delicate works in watercolour and ink on Indian paper. For NADA NY, the display is unified with a site-specific mural installation that threads and weaves between the works.
At once ecological, philosophical, and deeply personal, Liang’s practice centres on an ongoing ontological inquiry: What does it mean to be human in an era of ecological crisis? Her paintings emerge as responses to the human-induced climate emergency, drawing on marine biology and prehistoric life forms to reimagine the organic shapes and shifting ecosystems of the ocean floor. Fossils, in her work, become not relics of the past but premonitions of the future—prophetic traces of what might remain.
Liang’s latest works resonate with the historical idea of the Wunderkammer, or cabinet of curiosities—not as an Enlightenment-era system of classification, but as a fragmented, intuitive collection of the natural world’s residues. Her works are inspired by objects gathered during long walks through the British countryside, particularly along the Jurassic Coast: seaweed, flakes of mica, porous bones shaped by the sea, minerals, seeds, and leaves. These are not souvenirs of place, but fragments that call out to her, each carrying invisible timelines and geographies.
“I am not painting a stone,” she writes, “but the process of becoming a stone.”
This fluidity and dissolution of boundaries is echoed in Liang’s painterly language, where careful detail merges with expressive, gestural mark-making. Motifs are extracted from her studio environment and extended into the mural, forming a connective tissue that threads wall-based works into a single, living ecology. Just as in nature, no element stands alone; everything is interwoven, relational, becoming.
Rooted in her Chinese heritage yet constantly evolving through experimentation, Liang’s practice blends traditional materials with contemporary conceptual frameworks—including queer ecology, which challenges fixed binaries between human and non-human, self and environment. Her work embraces interdependence, kinship, and symbiosis, drawing inspiration from Donna Haraway’s notion of “making kin”—a call to reimagine our place within, not apart from, the living world.
Liang constructs a space that is intimate, unstable, and generative: a place where painting itself becomes a way of knowing, of listening, and of transforming. Like Borges’ Aleph, it is a point of convergence—where time collapses and all things are seen at once.
For press enquiries and to request a preview, please contact: [email protected]
At once ecological, philosophical, and deeply personal, Liang’s practice centres on an ongoing ontological inquiry: What does it mean to be human in an era of ecological crisis? Her paintings emerge as responses to the human-induced climate emergency, drawing on marine biology and prehistoric life forms to reimagine the organic shapes and shifting ecosystems of the ocean floor. Fossils, in her work, become not relics of the past but premonitions of the future—prophetic traces of what might remain.
Liang’s latest works resonate with the historical idea of the Wunderkammer, or cabinet of curiosities—not as an Enlightenment-era system of classification, but as a fragmented, intuitive collection of the natural world’s residues. Her works are inspired by objects gathered during long walks through the British countryside, particularly along the Jurassic Coast: seaweed, flakes of mica, porous bones shaped by the sea, minerals, seeds, and leaves. These are not souvenirs of place, but fragments that call out to her, each carrying invisible timelines and geographies.
“I am not painting a stone,” she writes, “but the process of becoming a stone.”
This fluidity and dissolution of boundaries is echoed in Liang’s painterly language, where careful detail merges with expressive, gestural mark-making. Motifs are extracted from her studio environment and extended into the mural, forming a connective tissue that threads wall-based works into a single, living ecology. Just as in nature, no element stands alone; everything is interwoven, relational, becoming.
Rooted in her Chinese heritage yet constantly evolving through experimentation, Liang’s practice blends traditional materials with contemporary conceptual frameworks—including queer ecology, which challenges fixed binaries between human and non-human, self and environment. Her work embraces interdependence, kinship, and symbiosis, drawing inspiration from Donna Haraway’s notion of “making kin”—a call to reimagine our place within, not apart from, the living world.
Liang constructs a space that is intimate, unstable, and generative: a place where painting itself becomes a way of knowing, of listening, and of transforming. Like Borges’ Aleph, it is a point of convergence—where time collapses and all things are seen at once.
For press enquiries and to request a preview, please contact: [email protected]
