Retreat

Retreat
By Stacie McCormick

Being an artist is an act of many commitments, and remaining an artist is an act of rebellion and resilience. The global world order insists upon a transactional metric: trade time to make money to survive. The artist, however, uses time to create something new, to intimately reveal how they experience the world. This act is crucially non-transactional, self-fulfilling, and yet not necessarily life-sustaining. Is it not ironic that the heroes and heroines of history are artists? Our museums are not filled with spreadsheets and investment proposals but with the legacies of creatives who shape our understanding of societies past and present—through pottery, mosaics, cave paintings, quilts, paintings, sculpture, music, poetry. The list is gratefully long.

For the artist, it is a constant struggle to insist, explore, and carve out time for crucial happenings— to see, feel, respond, and create. These acts are neither logical nor linear; they unfold simultaneously in an ongoing cycle of observation, absorption, synthesis, and expression.

This struggle to understand, interpret, and synthesize is at the heart of Yibei Liu’s Solo Residency Exhibition, Retreat. Chinese by heritage, living and working in the UK, Liu has navigated the isolation of COVID, the profound loss of her mother, and the remarkable distance from her father. She is the embodiment of resilience and insistence, choosing fine art ceramics—a medium that presents material and physical challenges at every stage, from malleability to fragility.

To explore the complexities of her experience through clay is to parallel life’s own transformations. Just as she molds the material, she is molded by the forces of grief, longing, and endurance. The ultimate trial by fire—both literal and metaphorical—produces sculptures steeped in pathos, pain, and the necessity of retreat. These works are monuments to the inward journey of grief, a state of being that distances the suerer from life itself. Overwhelming and isolating, grief forces adaptation. Like clay being worked by hand, grief works on us, forcing us to shift, to reshape. As the advice goes: you must go through it; there is no way around it.

Liu’s fragile ceramic figures capture this universal truth—humanity is sculpted by the challenges of existence. These works illustrate the precarious state of being, both figuratively and literally. Each piece is a mirror reflecting the journey of endurance: the invention, the work, the hope that each form will survive the fire.

Yibei Liu states, “I can only collect materials from my own perspective, conduct intuitive analyses, and arrive at conclusions that may seem naive. I recognise that dierent people will interpret this theme in entirely dierent ways, so my works do not seek to provide definitive answers, but rather to serve as an entry point for reflection.

”Retreat allows for the full spectrum of emotion. Artists are privileged—or perhaps burdened—to plunge into despair, salvage themselves through their work, and over that work as a bridge for connection. Liu reflects, “Even when trapped in an emotional low, feeling detached from desires, interests, and hope, we can try to shift our perspective. Our perception of the external world is not absolute—it is shaped by our own subjective state. If we take a step back, if we distance ourselves just a little, we may start to see things differently—people come and go, activities appear and disappear, emotions rise and fall, everything is in flux, and we are always moving within it.”

Retreat is therapy, preparation, resolution, and reflection, this is the spirit of Liu’s thinking, everything is better in Retreat.

About Yibei Liu

Yibei Liu (b. 1998, China) is a London-based figurative sculptor specializing in ceramics. Her work explores themes of grief, isolation, and resilience, reflecting her personal experiences and broader human emotions. A graduate of the Royal College of Art, Liu employs a meticulous coiling technique in her sculptures, using the slow, deliberate process as both an artistic and therapeutic practice. Her work has been exhibited internationally, gaining recognition for its emotional depth and technical precision.

She has always been interested in the human conditions. The curiosity about human behaviours and emotions becomes the nutrient for her creative process. The project “… …” shows a series of abstract figurative sculptures that visualize the feelings of being trapped in negative emotional loops. In self-healing, the artist hopes to open more dialogues and arouse public awareness of mental illness. Wishing to convey the message of “you are not alone” to the audience.Driven by impulses and inertia, people rarely slow down to think about the meanings and reasons behind their actions and emotions. As a child, the artist constantly asked herself: ‘why people do what they do?’ and’ why they feel what they feel’. Her current project serves as a starting point for further exploration of these questions. It is a personal documentary of her understanding of human conditions and records her study on finding the relationship between emotions, actions, and the psychological reasons behind them

Education & Awards 2023 The Ingram Prize winner 2023 The Global Design Graduate Show Shortlisted 2023 The CSM Graduate Award 2023 Nova Award Shortlisted 2023 BA(Hons) Ceramic Design First Class Honours, Central Saint Martins, London, UK2017 IB Diploma, Shanghai United International School, Shanghai, China