Beili Liu

ARTIST STATEMENT

For over two decades, I have been making material-and-process-driven sculptural environments that explore themes of migration, cultural memory, labor, social, and environmental concerns. My site-responsive installations and performances are rooted in the essence and history of a place. I explore resilience, healing, and hope through humble materials and accumulated labor. I am deeply interested in a material’s inherent ability to record the passage of time through anonymous, accumulated labor.

I incorporate women’s gestures of making within my sculptural compositions as an embodiment of resilience and healing. I transform found materials through handmaking as a way to process loss and grief and to cultivate hope. I question the boundary between vulnerability and power. Over the years, I’ve grown to view women’s work as fundamental and powerful. It is a universal language that can encompass cultural differences and social divides. 

In my work, I seek to examine resonating human experiences and concerns: loss and longing, uncertainty and hope, chaos and stillness: the yielding resilience that I see as the feminine strength, overcoming great obstacles, like dripping water eventually penetrates stone.

Project Statement for Hold On

The original composition of HOLD ON was created in direct response to the school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, on May 25th, 2022.

HOLD ON is composed of stark red, entangled lines—seams and hems cut from children’s clothing stiffened in red scenic paint. The flesh of the clothes is absent; only the outlines of the void remain. The red lines in turmoil cascade from two rebars anchored in the opposing ends of two hollow, concrete silos. These contours of absence are stretched, knotted, and tied. They cling onto one another, weaving a torn, fragile web that links the two solemn industrial columns. Collectively, the red lines in tension pull and bend the two rebars inward toward the center, embodying the unbearable weight of the ongoing trauma.

ARTIST BIO

Beili Liu is a visual artist who has exhibited extensively across the globe, in locations including Norway, Finland, UK, Germany, Italy, Spain, Lithuania, France, Belgium, Austria, Poland, China, Taiwan and across the United States. She has presented solo exhibitions at Hå Gamle Prestegard, Norwegian National Art and Culture Museum; Galerie An Der Pinakothek Der Moderne, Munich, Germany; Museo di Villa Bernasconi, Como, Italy; Elisabeth de Brabant Art Center, Shanghai, China; Chinese Culture Foundation, San Francisco, CA; the Crow Museum of Asian Art, Dallas, TX; Art Museum of Southeast Texas, Beaumont, TX; and Women & Their Work, Austin, TX, among others. Significant group exhibitions at the National Museum for Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C.; New Orleans Art Museum, LA; Grand Rapids Museum of Art, MI; Asian Art Week, NYC; Asia Society Texas Center, Houston, TX; Artpace, San Antonio, TX; San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art, CA; and internationally at the Hamburg Art Week, Germany; M.K. Ciurlionis National Art Museum, Kaunas, Lithuania; Zhejiang Museum of Art, China; Musée de la Dentelle in Caudry, Montrouge, France; Asian Art Week, London, UK; and Bunkier Sztuki Gallery, Kraków, Poland. Liu has created public artworks in Beijing, Jilin and Shanghai, China, Bremerhaven, Germany, Taiwan, San Francisco, CA, Dallas and Austin, TX.

Liu has received numerous fellowships and awards, including the Andrew Carnegie Fellowship (2022-2024), the Pollock Prize for Creativity (2022), the Fulbright Arctic Chair, Norway, a Fulbright Distinguished Chairs Award (2021-2022), the Fulbright Finland Inter-Country Grant (2022), the Brian Wall Grant for Sculptors (2022), NYFA Fiscal Sponsorship (2021-2024), Bessie Honoree for Outstanding Visual Design (2020), for Liu’s stage installation at the Lincoln Center, NYC, a New York Times Critic’s Pick (2019), the Joan Mitchell Painters and Sculptors Grant (2016), the National Endowment for the Arts Challenge America Grant through the Museum of Southeast Texas (2014). In 2018, Liu was honored by the Texas Legislature as the Texas State Artist in 3D medium. Liu received the Distinction Award at the Kaunas Biennial, Lithuania (2011), and a San Francisco Mayor’s Award (2008) for her contribution to cultural exchange.

Liu’s work has been featured by PBS Arts in Context series, Sculpture Magazine, Art in America, New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, ArtNews, Art Papers, ArtSlant, Artillery, The Huffington Post, Climate Progress, Public Art Review, Sacchi Review, UK, Helsinki Sanomat News, Finland, Morgenbladet, Norway, China Daily, Yishu, Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art, Hamburg Abendblatt and Vita (Life) Magazine, Italy, among others.

Born in Jilin, China, Beili Liu now lives and works in Austin, Texas. Liu received her MFA degree from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (2003) and is the Leslie Waggener Endowed Professor in the College of Fine Arts and a Regents’ Outstanding Teaching Professor at the University of Texas at Austin.