LRRewind: Interview with Iris Yu

Tori: Hello, listeners! This is Tori from Long River Rewind. Today, I’m here with Iris Yu, a talented artist whose painting, titled “Lobster Maiden”, is featured on the cover of Long River Review’s 29th edition. Iris’ work, specifically “Lobster Maiden”, “Three Bunnies at Midnight”, and “Tidewrack”, is featured within the issue as well. And, she has also been featured in Fulton Magazine. Recently, her piece “Three Bunnies at Midnight” won the 2025-2026 Gloriana Gill art award for painting, drawing, or cartooning. Today, we’re going to talk about her piece, her visual art process, and her creative influences. Welcome, Iris! We are so happy to have you here today. Do you mind introducing yourself? What’s your year, major, and where are you from?

Iris: Wow, thank you so much, Tori, for that intro. Yeah, so my name is Iris. I am a senior here at UConn, and I am an art major concentrating in drawing and painting, and also a physiology and neurobiology major. I’m from Avon, Connecticut.

Tori: Wow, what a stacked resume, and I’m glad to hear that you are a senior about to go out into your place in the world! Before getting into your piece, I’d love to know a little bit more about your relationship with art, and the way its presence has evolved – or remained constant – throughout the years. You have a major that’s quite different from typical artistic visuals, and I was wondering if that also plays a role in shaping your artistic journey and livelihood?

Iris: Definitely. I think my interest in art has always been incredibly intertwined with an interest in the human experience. When I was a kid, I felt like everyone was always just creative and drawing, and then as I got older, I became very fascinated with what beauty is, and how people can be beautiful. I’m also really fascinated with how painting, particularly, has the ability to convey kind of scary things, while also being very beautiful. Like this sort of space where you can have immense beauty, but also drama and horror, or all these very extreme emotions. It’s very enticing to me. So I’ve been very interested in that. And I’ve always loved the baroque paintings of all these religious figures dramatically engaged in a scene, all looking at the same thing, dramatic lighting – I just love the drama of painting.

Tori: That’s so cool! Turning to your featured pieces in the magazine, can you describe your artistic process for creating “Lobster Maiden”, “Three Bunnies At Midnight”, and “Tidewrack”? Do these exemplify any of your experiences with horror, baroque paintings, dramatic lighting, or anything like that?

Iris: Yeah, I mean, totally. These three pieces are actually kind of disparate in their aesthetic. They look kind of different from each other. I’m thrilled that “Lobster Maiden”is the cover. That painting was actually kind of a breakthrough for me because I, prior to that point in time, had been making work that was very grounded in representation. When I was making that painting, I felt super limited by, basically the process of thinking of an idea, planning it out, posing for it, finding a model or something, lighting it, and then just copying that. I felt like it was too formulaic. I wanted to still engage with the figure, but not be tied down to representation. So, I had this canvas where I was literally just doing whatever on. It was like, “oh, I think I’ll put this scary person in this corner, and put this person over here”, and it just became a mess. I was like, “oh… this kind of sucks.” I put it in the corner of my studio for literally months! And then, I was looking, one day, at these old paintings by this painter Hans Holbein the Younger. There are these very dramatic figures, teal-blue background, and very piercing gaze, typically holding something like an animal. I don’t know why, but with that type of imagery, I was like, “Woah! This is so enticing to me.” There’s something so serious about it, but also regal and beautiful. If you look up his work, the way he paints is so detailed and beautiful. So, I was like “What if I took the blue background from that and slabbed it?”, and basically created a figure out of this canvas that I had. And so I thought about that, and I was like “This feels like it needs something else,” so then I added the hands holding the lobster. If you look at the painting, there’s distinct realism but also a lot of abstraction happening. It was the first point in which I really departed from one-to-one representation.

Tori: For “Three Bunnies at Midnight” and “Tidewrack”, did you have similar artistic inspiration from any other sources?

Iris: Totally, totally. For “Three Bunnies at Midnight”, I actually made that prior to the lobster painting. It’s a woodblock print that I made in a printmaking class here at UConn. Highly recommend. It’s actually based on a poem that one of my dear friends wrote, my friend Bryce Carl, who is a brilliant writer and poet. She had this poem that was basically about this scene that she actually witnessed, which was when she was walking home from somewhere at night and saw three bunnies hiding, in the shadow of a lamp, from a fox. And so she wrote a poem about that. She read me the poem, and that scene stood with me for so long. I was like, “I need to make this into an image.” So I asked “Hey, can I use your poem as inspiration for my print?”, and she was like “Yes, of course!” That print is a love letter to her poem, and it’s just a beautiful sort of way to service another form of art.

Tori: Wow, that’s incredible. I love artistic connection in that way, in the ways where literature can tie with art, and vice versa. That’s amazing. But, pivoting towards “Tidewrack” as well, would you say that creative influence was also immersed within this piece, or was it more independent?Iris: Yeah, that painting was a real struggle for me to make, actually. And I also consider that painting to be a huge breakthrough painting for me as well. I don’t think I’ll ever sell it or get rid of it. You look at the painting, and there’s actually like five paintings underneath it. That was not as much of an external, direct influence. More like I’m brave enough to put this color where, I guess, it shouldn’t be. Because I was, again, departing from one-to-one realistic representation. Am I brave enough to put a figure here, or get rid of this really well-painted area and replace it with something? And I think that taught me a lot about how to be confident and bold to actually move on to something more imaginative within the medium of painting.

Tori: That’s amazing. Yeah, the piece “Tidewrack” appears to come from a larger exhibition according to your portfolio website irisyuart.com. What inspired the name “Tidewrack”? For general context, “Tidewrack” is the accumulation of seaweed and debris on beach shores. What does that mean to you and to your larger exhibition “Tidewrack 2026”?

Iris: Wow, that’s a great question. Yeah, so I’m actually super bad at titling paintings. I’m not a poet, so it’s a struggle. I put so much work into making the image, and then it’s “Okay, think of a phrase or word to encapsulate it,” and it’s like, “I can’t do this!” So, I made this painting and it has this quality of being like “What is going on?” There’s all this random stuff on the beach. I’m drawn to the beach as a setting for paintings because of that reason. Basically, you could feasibly have anything wash up on the beach. There’s so much stuff in the ocean, there’s a bunch of creatures, a bunch of animals live on the beach, I presume, and people go to the beach and swim in the ocean. There’s a sort of mystery about it. I wanted to find a word for things that wash up on the beach. So I was literally Googling words for things that wash up on the beach. And there’s a lot of different words, but they’re not mysterious. They don’t have that spell-like quality. But then I came across tidewrack, and I was like, “Oh. Yes.” That was a word that I don’t think I’ve ever heard before used. I think I’m low-key repopularizing that word, I’m not going to lie! But yeah, and then it became such a powerful metaphor for me because I’m interested in the emergence of things from the deep. In the case of the larger show “Tidewrack”, it was really exploring how porcelain is a metaphor for bodies and for femininity. A lot of porcelain was lost in the ocean during the time of the maritime Silk Road. It’s crazy, you can look it up. There’s beautiful images of bowls and vases and plates at the bottom of the ocean, with coral growing on it, and starfish living on it. And then they are brought out and they’re all cracked and melded together and disfigured, but they’re still beautiful. I was like “Woah, this is such a great metaphor for what it means to be beautiful as a feminine Asian person.” Because I think we all are familiar with porcelain as a metaphor for beauty on the body, like porcelain skin, glass skin. So I was like, “What if instead of being beholden to the perfection of porcelain as a human, we could go into the ocean and be liberated from that standard of beauty into a wholenew type of beauty that is more mysterious, and less beholden to the hierarchical categories.”

Tori: Wow, that’s an incredible reflection on historical influence and depictions of femininity and what it means to be feminine on your art. I think that’s beautiful. Lastly, I want to end by asking you about where you imagine your artistry and art career heading in the coming years. Do you picture some sort of evolution, or some sort of pivot, towards any particular direction?

Iris: That’s a really good question. Yeah, I mean, 100%. I believe that I am evolving. I’m still really interested in the ocean because of its presence everywhere and also because it’s very fun to paint, honestly. But I’ve kind of recently been interested in religion and mythology. Back to the original thing in painting that I was drawn to when I was a kid. I was really drawn to these very dramatic religious paintings. And I feel like for me, painting is such a great medium of conveying spiritual, transcendent things like that. So I’m very interested in that, and I’ve been really into Joseph Campbell, who wrote a lot about religion and the monomyth. I’ve been really researching different rhymes and mythological and religious traditions and trying to incorporate that into my art. For example – just to give an example – there’s this, sort of, symbol of a woman eating fruit, and that comes out in the Bible, it’s in Snow White, it’s in the myth of Persephone and Hades. All these different stories where a woman eats a fruit and then something crazy happens. Why is it like that? What is that? And it’s also something that everyone kind of knows, because it’s so embedded in our culture. So I’m very interested in those different rhymes within mythology and spiritual traditions.

Tori: That’s incredible! Well, I look forward to it and your future work. Thank you so much for your time with us today Iris. We really appreciate having you on the podcast.

Iris: Thank you! This was so fun.

Tori: I’d like to thank the Whus studio for allowing Long River Rewind to use this studio and I’d like to thank Iris Yu for being on the show and sharing her experiences about her artistic journey, and the creation of these beautiful and intricate, historically, literarily-backed pieces that we are so proud to feature in our upcoming magazine edition.

Iris: Thank you so much for having me.

Tori: Thank you!