Lily Yu (b. 2003) is an Asian-American multidisciplinary artist based in Savannah, Georgia. Her work unpacks the layered experience of growing up in the American South, especially in Southern Georgia, where memory and identity blur into myth. Through paint and mixed media, she tells stories—some hers, some shared—that explore the strange comfort of the past and the quiet tension beneath it. Childhood, for Lily, is both a landscape and a lens: a way to reframe the familiar and dig into what’s buried just under the surface. She’s currently studying at the Savannah College of Art and Design, where she continues to push at the edge between nostalgia and discomfort, softness and distortion.

I paint the American South the way it lives in my memory—familiar but a little unsettling, full of long stretches of land and quiet moments that feel like they’re holding something just beneath the surface. I’m drawn to the things that linger in my mind: old family stories, childhood imagery, the past, and the tension between comfort and discomfort that comes with looking back. My work is rooted in memory—both mine and the kind we share collectively—and I use it to explore identity, tradition, and how things shift over time.

Painting feels necessary to me. It’s how I process what I see and feel, how I make sense of where I come from. There’s a rhythm to it, like chasing a memory you can’t quite hold onto. Through these big open spaces and small, intimate details, I want to invite people into that search. What we carry with us, what we let go of, and what it all means.