LOOKING BACK AT YOU
Kaiyuan Yang
17 August 2026 – 21 August 2026
Looking Back at You, an exhibition by Kaiyuan Yang, explores ‘people pleasing’ through three photographic series. Curated by Xin Liu, the exhibition was presented at Lychee One Gallery from 17 to 21 August 2026. It combines the artist’s experiences, reflections and cultural expectations in order to examine the consequences of orienting one’s life around others.
It opens with Ghost Marriage, a series exploring the Chinese tradition of ghost marriage, in which two people who died unmarried may be symbolically united in death. Through six photographs, Yang re-creates a ceremony and its procession, using lighting to heighten the drama of the scenes. The series focuses on the function of appeasing and pacifying the dead.
Conversation with the Reflection turns inward, presenting Yang in snow alongside a mirror in which he encounters his reflection. The images explore loneliness, internal numbness and the loss of self that can accompany the desire to please others.
The final series, The Edge of Warmth, considers the extremes of living for oneself or for others, presenting isolation as their consequence. Together, the series form a progression from expectation to personal consequence, prompting questions about identity, connection and the sacrifices made in pursuit of others’ satisfaction.
About The Artists
Kaiyuan Yang’s artistic practice bridges photography, moving image and installation. He frequently engages with the tension between individual experience and social structures through a highly constructed visual language. Drawing from cultural traditions, technological ethics and psychological mechanisms, he creates image fields rich in narrative density that exist between reality and metaphor.
In his work, Yang emphasises the dramatic quality and symbolic systems of images. Through meticulous scene composition, lighting control and technical interventions, his works visually evoke a tension that lies between reality and illusion. At the same time, he embeds personal experiences within broader cultural and social issues, ensuring that his works are more than just perceptual representations; they become critical reflections on the contemporary condition.
About The Curator
Xin Liu is an independent curator and cultural researcher based in London. Her curatorial practice focusing on the relationships between technological media, structures of memory and cross-cultural contexts within contemporary art. She examines how art reconstructs individual experience within a globalised and digitalised social environment, and continues to explore the perceptual spaces and social narratives formed by film, installation, new media and interdisciplinary practices. Xin Liu holds a Master’s degree in Creative and Cultural Industries from King’s College London. Her academic background enables her curatorial approach to integrate dimensions of cultural studies, social observation and contemporary visual analysis. She has also participated in Tate’s ‘Museum Curating Now: Behind the Scenes at the Tate’ programme, which provided deeper insight into the curatorial logic, public programmes and institutional operations within the UK’s contemporary art museum system.
In recent years, Xin Liu has remained active within independent art spaces and cross-cultural art projects across the world. Her curatorial practice focuses especially on the positionality of Asian artists within international contexts, as well as the ways in which female experience, digital culture and emotional structures are transformed within contemporary art. She seeks to establish, through her exhibitions, an open and permeable relationship with the viewer, enabling audiences to re-perceive the ever-changing connections between the body, time and the social environment within the exhibition space.
