Yu Xiao is an abstract artist, art researcher and educator. Born in China, she graduated with a master’s in fine arts from Central Saint Martins in London in 2010. She is a practice-led PhD candidate at the Royal College of Art in the UK and based in London. Yu authored the book Interviews with Well-Known British Contemporary Artists and has contributed to various art research publications such as Muttering and Earthwise. Her art practice primarily revolves around painting, but also includes painting-related installations and performances. She has held five solo exhibitions and has been invited to participate in numerous significant group exhibitions worldwide. Such as ‘The Declaration of Independence’ at Today Art Museum in Beijing in 2011, the Royal Academy of Arts in London (Curated by Tess Jaray RA) in 2012, the ‘Meta-forms’—the public section of Miami Art Basel (Curated by Nicholas Baume) in 2015, and ‘Elsewhere/Here’ at the He Xiangning Art Museum in Shenzhen in 2018.

Abstract
This paper investigates Tess Jaray’s abstract painting through an Asian lens, employing in-betweenness thinking. It argues that the aesthetics of Jaray’s work reflects the Asian yin-yang paradigm, a conceptual framework for understanding the dynamic balance and reciprocal relationship between contrasting elements. Jaray’s artistic vision was significantly influenced by her Abbey Minor Traveling Scholarship in 1960, overlaying her Austrian background, which allowed her to experience the substance of Rome’s ‘space between’ with her original Austrian culture. In this context, she began to extract patterns from Italian architecture, and the interpretation offered here suggests that their resemblance to Buddhist mandalas inadvertently lends her work an implicit sense of transnational thinking. The idea of how the feminine identity and hybridity in culture may be imprinted in geometric abstract form is further pursued. The focus on Jaray’s artistic practice is analysed through the prism of interstitiality, which challenges the gender binary and embraces the liminal spaces between dichotomies to develop a very contemporary practice of abstraction.
This paper not only foregrounds the visual vocabulary of making that resonates with both Western and Eastern philosophical thoughts but also underscores the importance of a multicultural perspective in art interpretation. Its primary aim is to transcend geographical, gender, and cultural confines.

Image: Tess Jaray, Garden of Anna,1966,Oil on canvas, 183x229cm