The fantastical world of Yirui’s creation, which draws upon and re-contextualizes the hallmarks of urban life—clubbing, jazz, shopping, bike riding, picnics—to present a blended whirl of fragmentary narratives, features recurring characters that find themselves in all manner of environments, both realistic and otherworldly. The protagonist in Yirui’s rather cinematic universe, a Quinten Tarantino-inspired bride with an eye patch and flaming orange hair, represents a wildly misbehaved version of a classic female stereotype. She dances on a keyboard in Omega (2022), is engulfed in a swarm of bees in Flight of the Bumble- Bee (2022), and gets her mugshot taken while shoe shopping in Which Size? (2022).

A Girl Cut in Five, inspired by Claude Chabrol’s 2007 comedic thriller A Girl Cut in Two, similarly verges on the abject as it pictures five manifestations of Yirui’s iconic bride, here donned in a nurse’s cap and multiple eye patches. The confluence of these two signifiers, one representative of quintessential goodness and the other of mischievousness, generates an ambiguity as to the bride’s true nature: what are her motives in this topsy-turvy world of split personalities and fractured spaces? In such a space, Yirui’s use of repetition does not only enhance the surreality of her compositions, but—as exemplified in A Girl Cut in Five by the numerous eye patches plastered across the faces of the five brides and hanging suspended in the amorphous pink background—begin to register less as discernible objects and more so as a painterly mark-making technique. A similar effect recurs in Which Size? wherein a wall of shoes on shelves also registers as notes on a musical score, or merely spontaneous dabs of paint on a canvas.

This transformation of everyday objects into aesthetic motifs and uncanny configurations is a defining trait of Yirui’s practice and one that contributes to her compositions a sense of whimsey and play. Banal objects, most often fire extinguishers, billiard balls, toilets, balloon animals (or some might see them as Jeff Koons’ inflatable dogs), and electric plugs also pervade Yirui’s imagined world and occasionally take on, quite literally, a life of their own; some of the dancing figures in Omega and the scooter riders in Kick Scooter Rider (2022) appear to be anthropomorphized extension cords with flailing limbs and a notable sense of style. Though Yirui subverts and reimagines them, such objects are appealing to the artist because of their universality—the ability for anyone, from anywhere, to recognize a visual language rooted in the everyday.