Jonathan Carver Moore is thrilled to present Latitude Unknown, a solo presentation by Yunfei Ren, on view from April 18 to May 31, 2025. Ren’s latest paintings chart shifting geographies of movement, where migration is not a singular event but an ongoing state of transformation. These works function as temporal portals, drawing from the visions of migrants during their voyages—sun, stars, wind, coasts, and waters—inviting viewers into spaces where past and present blur.
Inspired by Julie Mehretu, Frank Bowling, and Sam Gilliam, Ren’s paintings capture a state of flux where memory and forgetting, rootedness and displacement, exist in delicate balance. Through layered colors, deconstructed forms, and gestural marks, his compositions create an embodied cartography mapped through an enduring iconography of passage, rendered anew. Currents of pigment stretch, break apart, and reassemble, mirroring the impermanence of borders—both physical and psychological. Abstraction articulates ambiguous temporality, where specificity dissolves into fields of color and line, yet becomes amplified through the singularity of a brushstroke or the bleed of paint.
As spaces of convergence, these paintings embrace the instability of perception, allowing meaning to shift with each encounter. Forms emerge and recede, echoing the fragmentary nature of memory and the fluidity of migration. Latitude Unknown lingers with these tensions, inviting viewers to step into the visions of Ren’s paintings—histories both personal and collective that continue to accumulate sedimented meanings with time.
Yunfei Ren works across painting, installation, and photography, constructing temporal portals that collapse the boundaries between past and present. His practice engages with history, memory, and migration, mapping cycles of movement, transformation, and recurrence. By layering images and materials, Ren’s work traces how memory lingers and histories resurface, echoing across time.His work has been exhibited at Fort Mason, the de Young Museum, Stanford University, and the Chinese Historical Society Museum, and has also been featured in The Washington Post.