QING LIU was born on a small island in Fuzhou City, Fujian Province, China. Liu received his B.A. with Summa cum Laude from the School of Art and Architecture at UCLA and MFA in Visual Arts from Columbia University in 2006. Liu currently lives and works in New York City.
WORDS ON PICTURES:
Contemporary artistic practice has been going through a period of change, blossom, confusion, uncertainty and hope. There is no singular discourse, genres or trend that can define or majorly affect what is going on in the art world today. It seems that the artists have finally achieved true artistic autonomy in their practices. On one hand, such an artistic condition helps artists create widely diverse images, objects and situations; on the other, it proposes an artistic perplexity, in which artists are being challenged to reexamine the relationship among the production of art, the production of art-as-commodity and the theoretical endangerment in practice. My work is a symptom (temporary), a reflection (fragmentary) and an examination (incomplete) of such condition that contextualizes my practice and my relationship to the history of that practice.
Deriving directly and indirectly from my personal experiences and through poetic imagination, my work not only intends to address the limitations of representation and the material conditions of mediums, but also to raise questions on the cultural and political structures within which I navigate, and on the aspects of politics - cultural, political and sexual - that construct our everyday life. Whether it is a photograph, a drawing, a video piece, an installation or a short story, my work is always structured in a way that exemplifies my personal experiences as an immigrant, a cultural “outsider” thriving for the meanings of existence in the threshold of politics and desire; it dwells in a liminal space where the oppositional collides, activating possibilities of meanings within a field of boundaries, ambiguity, margin and instability, whether or not oppositions are illuminated by conflicts between the individual and the state, desire and loss, the private and the public, reality and imagination.
WORDS ON PICTURES:
Contemporary artistic practice has been going through a period of change, blossom, confusion, uncertainty and hope. There is no singular discourse, genres or trend that can define or majorly affect what is going on in the art world today. It seems that the artists have finally achieved true artistic autonomy in their practices. On one hand, such an artistic condition helps artists create widely diverse images, objects and situations; on the other, it proposes an artistic perplexity, in which artists are being challenged to reexamine the relationship among the production of art, the production of art-as-commodity and the theoretical endangerment in practice. My work is a symptom (temporary), a reflection (fragmentary) and an examination (incomplete) of such condition that contextualizes my practice and my relationship to the history of that practice.
Deriving directly and indirectly from my personal experiences and through poetic imagination, my work not only intends to address the limitations of representation and the material conditions of mediums, but also to raise questions on the cultural and political structures within which I navigate, and on the aspects of politics - cultural, political and sexual - that construct our everyday life. Whether it is a photograph, a drawing, a video piece, an installation or a short story, my work is always structured in a way that exemplifies my personal experiences as an immigrant, a cultural “outsider” thriving for the meanings of existence in the threshold of politics and desire; it dwells in a liminal space where the oppositional collides, activating possibilities of meanings within a field of boundaries, ambiguity, margin and instability, whether or not oppositions are illuminated by conflicts between the individual and the state, desire and loss, the private and the public, reality and imagination.
