Untitled Art Houston 2026: Presenting Yezi Lou

Jeni Abramson Gallery presents a solo booth of new paintings by Yezi Lou at Untitled Art, Houston, Booth N26.

Lou (b. 1997, Wenzhou, China; lives and works in New York) examines material culture, social phenomena, and the East Asian diaspora experience through the reinterpretation of image. Working in oil on canvas, her paintings draw from photographic archives, found ephemera, and cultural symbols, rendering them with material presence while cultivating distance and ambiguity.

Living within a culture saturated by the endless circulation of images, Lou approaches painting as an active process of reconsidering and reanimating what has been seen, remembered, and forgotten. Her works function as traces of encounters, carrying fragments of personal and collective histories while resisting fixed narratives. Through figurative language, subtle distortions, artificial color, and layered imagery, she creates spaces where familiarity and estrangement coexist.

Central to her practice is the understanding of memory as a form of visuality rather than a stable historical record. Migration, cultural displacement, and the passage of time continually reshape the images we carry of people, places, and events. By treating painting as a site where perception, memory, and imagination intersect, Lou's work examines how belonging is constructed through images and how images, in turn, shape the ways we understand ourselves and the world around us.

Lou received her MFA in Painting and Drawing from UCLA in 2025. This is her first presentation at Untitled Art.