Yu Xiao has always been fascinated with the image of the child, and this fascination has given her works an overall sense of continuity.
 
The series Never Grow Up belongs to Yu's early works. At the liminal space between school and society, Yu turned her self-image into a child who never wants to grow up. She thus created a character who has always had a comfortable life, whose youthful narcissism veers toward the infantile and the naive, who wants to induce love and praise from her audience by the wiles of her sincerely pretentious naïveté.

However, sooner or later a person must grow up and face reality, ---and it is in this sense that the series The Origin is for Yu an important transitional work. That complacently naive character in Never Grow Up is now placed in a vibrant yet dangerous jungle of desires. What The Origin realizes is the artist's imagination of the "real world": the angelic child in a primitive jungle, and she must face it alone.

The series Nursery Rhymes has a special place in Yu's works. On the one hand, she has broken free of Henri Rousseau's visual influence; on the other hand, she has also freed herself from anxieties of growing up, and is now ready to develop a visual language of social criticism. In this series, Yu purposely created a sense of crisis that is at once bright and chilly. And in all kinds of dangerous situations, Nursery Rhymes sweeps away the paradoxical "warmth" of Never Grow Up and The Origin.

In an age of high-tech visual information processing, the world has become a simulacrum. The world of simulations is neither real nor fake; everything is a scrambled mosaic of broken pieces; all images are being continuously cut and pasted, fixed and re-fixed, re-contextualized into a jungle of simulations. However, I still believe in the existence of "the real". In fact, I believe that the reason why Yu's created images can touch us is precisely because even a simulated world is not totally feelingless and illusory. And this may be the meaning of images in our times: if images are no longer the record of the real, then it may still reveal its traces; and it may encourage us to resist, more resolutely than before, what is in the deepest sense unreal.