FOOL’S HOUR

Presented by M. David & Co. at Art Cake in partnership with Yellow Chair Salon

April 17 – May 10, 2026
Opening Reception: April 17, 2026, 6-8pm

Studio 10
Art Cake: 214 40th Street, Brooklyn, NY 11232
Hours: Friday & Saturday, 1-6 pm and by appointment

Find the checklist here!

We are thrilled to present Fool’s Hour, a solo exhibition of works by Xinyu Liu curated by John Yau in Art Cake’s Studio 10.

On Being Artist

Xinyu Liu, who was born in Shanghai, China, decided at an early age she wanted to become an artist. After graduating from the Shanghai Institute of Technology, where she majored in product design, she moved to New York and enrolled in the MFA program in fine art at the School of Visual Arts. Since graduating from SVA, she has continued to work across mediums and gone on to create a substantial body of work, which is the basis of her exhibition, Fool’s Hour.

The exhibition consists of sculpture that is both fabricated and hand carved, drawings in colored pencil, etchings, and mixed media works. Running through all the work is a sense of displacement and adventure, mixed with a tender comic awareness of the absurdities of daily life, as the artist navigates a strange new world. As tempting as it is to read the work through the lens of being an immigrant, I think the world of machines, obstacles, ferris wheels, houses, and abstract circuits, is about the existence of parallel worlds. In the world that the artist has imagined in detail, a turtle (Liu’s surrogate) makes its way through an indifferent environment. We could read this image as a metaphor for the artist trying to make her way forward.

What makes Liu’s work special is the breadth of her commitment to mastering different, divergent mediums, from the fabricated to the handmade. Despite the differences in materials, what the work shares is Liu’s desire for precision. We see evidence of this in the smoothly fitting parts of the acrylic Ferris wheel, the different tonalities and lines in the etchings, the spacing between the abstract elements in her drawings, and the lettering in the hand-carved wooden box. Precision and imagination are inextricable parts of Liu’s process. The turtle seems an apt choice as a surrogate; it carries its house with it wherever it goes.

What comes across in Liu’s turtle is an air of self-containment and determination. As a metaphor, it speaks to her journey as an artist, and the sense that one is always searching — that that kind of looking and thinking is essential to becoming an artist. William Shakespeare’s fools always speak the truth. They use their wit to get at something deeply complex. Something similar happens when we engage with Xinyu Liu’s art. She gets us to reflect upon what we are looking at, even as she transports us to another realm.

John Yau