Luce Gallery is pleased to present Liu Xin’s first solo exhibition, a series of works that traverse the unstable territory of dreams, memory, and the unconscious, giving form to an intimate and psychological mode of painting.

I Had the Same Dream as Freud is situated within Surrealist research, focusing on the exploration of the inner landscape of human nature. Through a layered visual language—where figures, symbols, and environments intertwine organically—the works investigate universal themes such as love, loneliness, and existence, rendering them within a dimension suspended between reality and dream.

Liu Xin develops her works from personal dreams, understood not as simple dream narratives, but as sites where hidden impulses and deep emotional truths emerge. Within these suspended imaginaries, characteristic of the dream experience, the human figure appears isolated and absorbed, often captured in moments of pause or waiting. The settings—rarefied domestic interiors, empty swimming pools, uninhabited seascapes, or natural landscapes—are not merely backdrops, but extensions of the figures’ emotional states. Recurring symbols such as apples, swimming pools, beds, sofas, and trees assume a metaphorical function, alluding to desire, loss, memory, and the fragility of being. Each work seems to contain an inner temporality, as if the action were suspended at the precise moment when thought takes precedence over gesture.

Following the path traced by Sigmund Freud in The Interpretation of Dreams, Liu Xin deconstructs the unconscious dynamics that inhabit the dream experience, blending them with symbolic elements drawn from Greek mythology. The result is a dialogue in which fragments of the subconscious and mythological archetypes overlap, generating a spiritual resonance capable of transcending temporal and spatial boundaries.

The choice of lighting, dominated by dark tones and muted colours, helps to evoke the unstable and nebulous quality of dreams, visually translating the subtle and often contradictory emotions that inhabit the subconscious. Within this visual space, the sense of destiny characteristic of Greek mythology encounters the deep currents of Freudian thought: latent desire, submerged loneliness, and existential questioning are transformed into an intense, restrained, and deeply meditative pictorial language.

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Bio‍

Liu Xin is a Chinese artist, born in Weifang, Shandong Province, in 1996. She graduated from the Experimental Art Department of the Xi'an Academy of Fine Arts in 2021 and obtained her Diploma from the Intermedia Art Department at the same academy in 2024.
Liu Xin lives and works in Xi'an, China.

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