LIU HONGRUI: PSYCHO-TOPOGRAPHY AS A LANGUAGE OF FLUX

Liu Hongrui (b. 2000, Shenzhen) is a London-based painter whose practice is shaped by diasporic experience and cultural hybridity. Raised in Hong Kong and relocating to the UK at the age of sixteen, he studied Fine Art at Central Saint Martins and completed an MA in Contemporary Art Practice at the Royal College of Art in 2023. 

His paintings reimagine the metropolis as psycho-topography — an interior landscape where memory, displacement, and affect converge. Layered surfaces, scraped textures, and saturated colour fields produce atmospheres that hover between solidity and dissolution. Rather than depicting place, Liu constructs a visual language that charts the simultaneity of inner life. 

Visual Method: Translating Inner Landscapes 

The artwork, Backed by Mountains, Facing The Sea (2025) exemplifies Liu’s method. Executed in oil and distemper, the canvas stages a façade of windows against a spectral horizon. Within each opening, fragments appear - concrete, windows, abstracted figures - emerging only to dissolve back into chromatic haze. Surfaces are layered, scraped back, and rearticulated, producing an unstable rhythm of concealment and revelation. 

Backed by Mountains, Facing The Sea, 2025, Oil and Distemper on Canvas, 130x130cm

Landscape and architecture collide in suspension. Windows become both thresholds and barriers, holding intimacy while also signalling estrangement. The mountains behind and the sea before serve not as geography but as psychological coordinates, articulating a diasporic subjectivity. Here, painting functions less as representation than as translation, where psychic conditions assume material form. 

Motifs of decay and chromatic intensity play in tandem. Architectural forms emerge only to dissolve; surfaces are layered, scraped, and sedimented with psychological weight. A spectral geography unfolds - where Hong Kong returns not as image but as atmosphere, held in tension with fragments of European cities. 

The Window, 2025, Oil and Distemper on Canvas, 90x90cm 

Between Hybridity and the Unconscious

The instability of Liu’s images resonates with postcolonial theories of hybridity, particularly Homi Bhabha’s notion of the third space - the in-between zone where cultural difference is rearticulated. Having lived between Shenzhen, Hong Kong, and London, Liu translates these crossings into painterly form, producing canvases that refuse singular identity. Architectural fragments and chromatic fields flicker between solidity and dissolution, embodying hybridity as process rather than state. 

At the same time, his practice extends the Surrealist concern with the unconscious. Yet unlike earlier Surrealism, which often retreated into dreamscapes, Liu situates psychic life within the infrastructures of the contemporary metropolis. Emotional registers are sedimented into surfaces; unconscious drives materialise as architectural motifs. His paintings reveal how psychic and cultural conditions shape one another, forming unstable terrains of perception. 

Hyper Urban Terrains 

As the duality of psychology and space, Liu’s exploration of psycho-topography is evident in his recent articulation in Hyper Urban, his solo programme within FABLES, SWANFALL ART ANNUAL EXHIBITION 2025. Hyper Urban conceives the metropolis not as fixed geography but as a psychological condition, where architectural fragments and spectral atmospheres translate memory, displacement, and affect into unstable terrains of colour and form. 

In Modern Education (2025), Liu Hongrui views education as an atmosphere. Geometric divisions collide with intense blocks of colour - sharp blues, urgent reds, and muted greys - that operate both as the framework of order and as markers of psychological states. The tension between rational structure and emotional turbulence reflects how systems shape the individual, while simultaneously being rewritten through personal experience. The work suggests that education is not merely the transmission of knowledge, but an invisible structure that reshapes our understanding of both self and world. 

Modern Education, 2025, Oil on Canvas, 90x90cm

Dejection (2025) translates affect into spatial tension. Muted blues and greys compress the surface, punctuated by abrupt flashes of ochre-red. Fragments recall doorframes or corridors but never stabilise, producing an inhabitable yet unsettled space. Emotion is not depicted but spatialised, transformed into a terrain of oscillation and release. 

Dejection, 2025, Oil on Canvas, 110x110cm 

In The Onlooker (2025), Liu explores surveillance and visibility. A spectral figure is partially absorbed into collapsing scaffolding, a fragile presence exposed to systems of observation. Meanwhile, City Dweller (2025) layers sedimented tones and fractured motifs to articulate the contradictions of urban existence - intimacy and alienation, collectivity and solitude. What binds these paintings is their refusal of fixity and their negotiation between interiority and exteriority. Liu offers the city as a site of contradiction and simultaneity - where isolation and collectivity, visibility and erasure, memory and presence coexist. 

City Dweller, 2025, Oil on Canvas, 90x90cm 

The Onlooker, 2025, Oil on Canvas,  200x150cm 

Liu Hongrui’s paintings position psycho-topography as both method and language. Architectural fragments, chromatic tensions, and gestural inscriptions become maps of psychological experience, rendering the instability of identity and memory visible in painterly form. His practice, grounded in translation and shaped by diasporic experience, articulates psychic and cultural instability through material precision and structural flux. 

As a millennial artist, Liu establishes a new visual language that maps the inner life of modernity. Refusing fixed terrain, his canvases unfold as a language of flux, where intimacy and estrangement, order and collapse, memory and disappearance coexist in fragile simultaneity. 

The Empty City, 2025, Oil on Canvas, 100x130cm 

White Landscape, 2025, Oil and Distemper on Canvas, 120x140cm 

Images: © Liu Hongrui, Courtesy of the Artist

Editor: Biyao (Katie) Yu