Hong Kong artist’s search for meaning of life leads to stark, geometric new work

Gaze a little too long at one of Peter Yuill’s geometric artworks, made up of painstakingly hand-drawn concentric circles, and your eyes will start to play tricks on you. The Hong Kong-based Canadian artist’s hypnotic, hypotrochoid shapes bisected with thick, black rectangles recall the spirograph art you might have once tried in maths lessons.

“The interconnectivity of the universe through mathematics is something that fascinates me,” says Yuill, 33, who until recently was known for his large mountain murals, paintings of skulls and birds inspired by the occult, and detailed illustrations of the city he has called home for eight years.

The former graffiti artist’s new series grew out of a period of “soul searching” and experimentation that found him researching ideas behind theoretical physics, astrophysics and philosophy.

“I realised they were trying to understand the same things,” he says. “I tried to get to the essence of the meaning of my life, what my purpose was, what I was trying to say. I wanted to move away from just representational illustration and make artwork that had meaning to me and carried some weight behind it.”