It is fitting for this critic, familiar primarily with the grammar of the moving image, to review an exhibition of paintings that practically gush off the canvas like a bubbling stream. The Upstairs at Bortolami’s Yuan Yuan show, the first of this artist’s to be on view in the States, is notable in a couple of regards upon first entering the gallery: the room is cavernous, segmented only by a few eggshell-white pillars at the center. In each corner of the space is a Yuan painting, three of which are larger in scale and immediately magnetic. The fourth, much smaller, demands attention by sheer comparison. The exhibition is curated this way for good reason: the paintings themselves are so kinetic and bristling with propulsion that to do anything more externally to the environment in which they’re presented would be to supercharge, overstimulate, electroconvulse the whole affair into a vegetative state.

It’s difficult not to recall Hito Steyerl’s enormously influential essay “In Defense of the Poor Image” when examining Yuan’s work, to be reminded of this filmic/digital material that “is no longer about the real thing … [but] about its own real conditions of existence: about swarm circulation, digital dispersion, fractured and flexible temporalities. It is about defiance and appropriation just as it is about conformism and exploitation. In short: it is about reality.” Sure, these are paintings at Bortolami, but by a Chinese artist whose career has been very much transient between cultures. Ubiquitous in his work is the tension between East Asian and American-European iconography, between the natural and the synthetic, between clean brushstrokes and the dissolution of such.

In these four new works, Yuan’s painterly hand pivots across techniques to the extent that a kind of “visual snow,” an aesthetic distortion, emerges in the texture of the canvases. Sometimes they are afforded their own portion within the larger painting; other times they bleed throughout. The effect is at once pixelated and fluid, a lapping watery movement within every component of the images, all of which depict water in some capacity. Steyerl’s poor image presents itself here, where the endemic and the foreign, the cultivated knowledge and the appropriated artifact, clash so viscerally that they dissolve into one complete, albeit crumbling, structure. Nowhere is this more prevalent than in one of the larger works in the show, Driftscape (2026). Derelict pools, algae-riddled creeks and alcoves, splintered rock formations, half-rendered flora pepper the interstitial spaces. And speaking of interstitial, some of the painting’s far background elements are quite literally in a void, a stark, blank whiteness devouring any detail that continues to sprawl outward from the striking tableau.

Slip (2026) is another grandiose work, emitting a Boschian violence without literal bloodshed. The violence is in its composition. One might immediately clock the eternally memeified blobfish, or the spiny sea stars, or impressions of netting and other intrusive or extractive human tools inching their way in here and there. Everything at once flails against everything else, existing in and of itself, imbuing the piece with a trenchant sense of movement. This painting is, after all, the most operatic, in-your-face, and classical of the bunch, but maybe that’s what makes it Yuan's most radical new piece. He appropriates the composition of a dominant Western institution (classic Dutch art) and infuses it with that poor-image modulation of technique and style that he consistently uses to dissolve boundaries and create apertures.

‍Clack-Clack (2026) offers the clearest representation of Yuan’s intercultural influences and conflicts. Again, a dilapidated—but less unkempt—pool doubles as a koi pond, which is at once constructed with and surrounded by mosaics of koi, which are themselves dissolving into a fragment of a beach scene, which is fully realized in the crowning tableau that haloes over everything else: a typical Euro-Western beach mosaic, replete with sunbathers, sand mounds, and languid Riviera-like nonchalance. At the very bottom of it all, among the painting’s heaviest distortion, a lone laundry basket at the edge of the pool-pond-abyss.

Pebble and Ripple (2026) is much smaller in scale: an atomization of natural elements, placing cave interior within outdoor landscape and outdoor landscape within cave interior. Again, Yuan’s varied brushstrokes allow for wisps of surreality, dissolution, and static creases that sprout like weeds among the imagery. As Steyerl further notes, “[works associated with the poor image] have become travelers in a digital no-man’s land, constantly shifting their resolution and format, speed and media, sometimes even losing names and credits along the way.” The resolution/format—in this case the actual size of the canvas—in Pebble and Ripple seems a deliberate disruption, an ostensibly simpler collage than the multilayered cultural tension and iconography in the other three works. 

One feels compelled, in the Bortolami space, to visit this one last. It is somehow more daunting in its compression, like an indistinct picture frame at the end of a dark hallway, beckoning a closer look. When that look is finally seized, one notices the previously camouflaged lion statue in the water. The rock-waterfall-cliff contours dissolve, the static floods back in, and somewhere within the image, an aperture opens.

Yuan Yuan is on view at The Upstairs at Bortolami from September 9 through October 24, 2026.