Artist: Junyi Lu

The Sunday Painter gallery presents "(cosset)," the first UK solo exhibition by artist Junyi Lu (b. 1996 in Guangzhou, China). Developed over the past year, Lu’s new body of work transforms the gallery into an immersive, enveloping environment through paintings, installations, and sculpture. The exhibition's title, with its enclosing parentheses, reflects Lu's ongoing exploration of internal tensions shaped by both personal histories and wider global structures. In dialogue with Hanya Yanagihara's 2022 novel To Paradise, which portrays characters caught between societal turmoil and the desperate search for protection, Lu examines how both the human body and domestic spaces function as paradoxical vessels. Like Yanagihara's protagonists, Lu's work navigates the boundaries between these dual-natured environments—spaces that act as both sanctuary and barrier.

This duality materialises through architectural elements—exposed insulation, wooden beams, and a 6-meter cotton curtain that both cocoons and divides the space. Limewash paint gives the gallery walls a weathered appearance, evoking themes of reuse, memory, and time's passage. In Liminal Comportment, an old painting torn in half has been hand-stitched to a new canvas. Two ethereal, ambiguous figures appear—one cut off at the seam, the other floating against a loosely drawn cylinder pole within a minimal, airy landscape. This joining of canvases creates a contrast between a partially concealed, layered past and a present characterised by uncertainty.

Lu's material choices function simultaneously as conceptual framework and autobiographical index, drawing from her experiences of geographical and cultural displacement—from attending boarding kindergarten in China, to five years in the United States and her current life in London. Through the strategic placement of unexpected elements such as metallic wires, nails, and ceramic offcuts, she deliberately complicates familiar structures to reveal how systemic infrastructures have reshaped our most intimate relationships. In Youngest in the Family, the artist merges domestic objects like cotton pajamas and cheesecloth with construction materials such as copper pipes and wool insulation. In works like b. b. b. k. (blue) and G. radual, H. idden, M. assive, the body emerges as a recurring motif, exploring how physical discomfort signals broader societal dysfunction. Having survived multiple firings at temperatures reaching 1100°C, these works bear physical evidence of transformation. Made from highly porous earthenware, they absorb and retain marks from the artist's hands, chemicals, smoke, and other materials—becoming resilient bodies of ruins despite their broken, leaky forms.

Through a deft interplay of materiality and metaphor, Lu creates a liminal space where personal and collective experiences intertwine. Commenting on the multi-layered nature of contemporary existence, "(cosset)" offers not only a reflection on displacement and belonging but also invites a reconsideration of how we inhabit and navigate the constructed worlds around us.

Junyi Lu was born in 1996 in Guangzhou, China. She currently lives and works in London, UK. She received her BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art in 2018, followed by her MFA from the Slade School of Fine Art in 2023. Recent solo exhibitions include: Watch Out, Kiddo, 2024, LINSEED, Shanghai. Selected group exhibitions include: Lattice structure of space-time, Indigo+Matter, London, 2024; Onsen Confidential, XYZcollective, Tokyo, 2024; Volatile Futures, 2023, Unit 1 Gallery, London; Slade MA/MFA/PhD Degree Show, Slade School of Fine Art, London, 2023; Slide a Glance, ASC Gallery, London, 2023; SPIIIIINELESS, UCL Art Museum, London, 2022; Era 2022, Crypt Gallery, London, 2022; In Our Image, After Our Likeness, Gajah Gallery, Yogyakarta, 2021. Lu received the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grant award in 2022.