About

Viviane Yijiun Lian is a French-Taiwanese artist based in London. Her large-scale figurative oil paintings explore the visual languages common to theatre and academic painting, such as mise-en-scène. Her first series, ‘Death Rites’, invents vignettes loosely based on the tragic narrative of Adam’s ballet, Giselle. These works not only showcase Lian’s extensive knowledge of ballet and its expressive modes, but also her academic background in anthropology which she uses to investigate the points of contact between death rituals, beauty, femininity, and group psychology. As a self-taught artist, Lian works both within and without the academic tradition of painting, exploring the paradoxes of its aesthetics as she brings its old-world notions of romanticism and melancholy into contact with modern concepts of the power of beauty in society. Lian’s next series interprets Joris-Karl Huysmans’ infamous novel Against Nature, by which she continues her exploration into themes of death, decay, and aestheticism.