Ya Luo

Capturing the physicality of the process of painting, Ya Luo creates an emotional awareness of the everyday items, objects, and scenes that continue to unravel around us. Her quiet paintings embrace negative space and the contemporary white-walled gallery context to investigate how pictorial space might expand into the three-dimensional world. Focusing her gaze on objects typical of historic still life paintings, Luo explores the otherwise invisible vulnerabilities and strengths of everyday materials and settings, asking whether objects — continually existing and responding to internal and external forces and pressures — could be more similar to people than we might otherwise think. 

Ya Luo completed her MFA at the Slade School in 2024 as a Sarabande Scholar. Luo has received the Sarabande Foundation Emerging Artist Fund 2024, was nominated for the Max Werner Drawing Prize 2023, and shortlisted for the Jackson’s Art Prize 2023. Her works have been shown around London as site-specific installations, at the Bankside Gallery, Purist Gallery, and with the Warbling Collective. Luo lives and works in London.