Lyn Liu b. 1993
"I have a penchant for observation, which leads me to meticulously gather intriguing social spectacle moments that deviate slightly from the norm in everyday life. I then extract the inherent absurdity within them to incorporate into my works."
—Lyn Liu
Lyn Liu's work addresses the psychological tension that underpins relationships between individuals through a sequence of uncanny cinematic tableaux. Her work draws from the artist's personal experiences of alienation, utilizing symbolism and an atmosphere of the absurd to provoke reflections on what Liu considers our oppressive social reality.
Conceiving of her compositions as stills in an overarching though dislocated narrative, Liu takes a filmic approach to considerations of light, staging, and costume. Depicting scenes often situated in the evening or at night, Liu's tightly rendered dreamscapes feature figures whose identities are concealed, masked, presented alongside a doppelganger, or hidden in shadow. This voyeurist instinct-a longing to see without being seen-acts both as a visual strategy and a window into the artist's experience as a child, when she traveled between cultures feeling like a perpetual outsider.
The striking symbols in Liu's paintings pulsate with a nihilist or existentialist philosophy in the vein of Albert Camus and Franz Kafka, whose work the artist has referenced throughout her oeuvre. Liu's interest in the book The Architectural Uncanny by Anthony Vidler further elaborates on the metaphorical potential of buildings and interiors in the work to speak to our modern condition.
The artist repeatedly returns to animal subjects as counterparts to her human figures. Recognizing both wild and domesticated animals as unknowable, unpredictable, and potentially dangerous, Liu's use of ostriches, frogs, and kangaroos as symbols occasions a fissure between the cycle of mutual observation found in human society. Employed in her paintings, they act to highlight the confusion of spectacle and the sense of alienation that can attend a condition of being observed.
Lyn Liu was born in Beijing, China, and is based in New York. Liu works primarily in painting, printmaking, and independent publications. She received her MFA from School of the Arts, Columbia University, New York, in 2022, and her BFA from the School of Visual Arts, New York, in 2016. Liu also attended École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, Paris, from 2017 to 2020. Her first exhibition in New York, Dogville, was mounted at Kasmin in 2022.