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Jiaqi Lyu examines the tension between an often-obscured past, suspended historical moments, and a promised future that remains unrealised. Her painting practice transforms archival materials, everyday objects, family histories, and intimate memories into ghostly presences, bridging multiple temporalities to create a space in which alternative forms of dialogue can emerge. Drawing on the visual language of Victorian spirit photography, her paintings employ a semi-photographic, semi-painterly approach to construct a phantom realm where everything oscillates between truth and falsehood, certainty and uncertainty, history and memory.

Her ongoing research is grounded in her experience of growing up in Northeast China and spending much of her young adulthood living abroad. Through this migratory bird-like position of distance and return, she revisits the historical and contemporary landscape of the region as a threefold borderland (a geographical, cultural, and historical frontier). Lyu focuses on investigating the condition of being marginalised and displaced, the gaps and omissions within authoritative, power-dominated historical narratives, as well as the moments when nostalgic recollection ceases to function. By conjuring the “ghosts” of history, her work reanimates a seemingly fossilised past, offering alternative ways of perceiving both the past and the present.