LIU Shiyuan

Liu Shiyuan’s artistic practice spans many mediums, including photography, video, text, spatial installation, and stage plays. By eliminating preconceptions and subjective value judgments, Liu maintains a sensible and rational detachment toward the subjects in her works. Regardless of self-produced film and photography or images and cultural resources appropriated, Liu Shiyuan fully mobilizes and recontextualizes the suspended semantics of her objects. Through which, the artist asks questions about many aspects of the world recorded and engulfed in images, such as how images shape stereotypes, how they disseminate propaganda and the impact of pop culture on human perceptions and value standards. In a sense, be they pictures, texts, or physical objects, they are like actors to be directed and rehearsed by the artist to reactivate their original meaning and emotional potential and to construct new pictorial mazes, narrative puzzles, and intellectual theaters in their interaction with each other.

Liu Shiyuan (b. 1985, Beijing, China) received her BFA from the Digital Media Art Department of the Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing, China. In 2012 she graduated with a Master’s degree from the Photography Department of the School of Visual Arts, New York, USA. Recent solo exhibitions include Suspended Frames, WHITE SPACE (Caochangdi), Beijing, China (2022); For Jord, Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, Los Angeles, USA (2020); Opaque Pollination, Frost Art Museum, Florida International University, Fort Lauderdale, USA (2020); In Other Words, Please Be True, WHITE SPACE (Caochangdi), Beijing, China (2019); Isolated Above, Connected Down, Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York, USA (2018); As Simple As Clay, Yuz Museum, Shanghai, China (2015). Recent group exhibitions include Mirror Image: A Transformation of Chinese Identity, Asia Society Museum, New York, USA (2022); NGV Triennial, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia (2020); The Mesh, Chi K11 Art Museum, Shanghai, China (2019); Lunar Phases, UCCA, Beijing, China (2019); The Mesh, Chi K11 Art Museum, Shanghai, China (2019); Encounter, Shanghai Urban Space Art Season (SUSAS) 2019, Shanghai, China (2019); The Intertextuality of Art and Poetry, OCAT Shenzhen, Shenzhen, China (2019); Front international – Cleveland Triennial for Contemporary Art: An American City, Cleveland, USA (2018); Welcome to The Jungle, Kunsthalle Dusseldorf, Dusseldorf, Germany (2018); Cold Night, UCCA, Beijing, China (2017); Yinchuan Biennale-For An Image, Faster Than Light, MOCA Yin Chuan, Yin Chuan, China (2016); Bentu, Chinese artists in a time of turbulence and transformation, Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris, France (2016); The 7th Shenzhen Sculpture Biennale, OCT-Contemporary Art Terminal, Shenzhen, China (2012). Liu Shiyuan currently lives and works in Beijing, China and Copenhagen, Denmark.