Artist Statement
Wen Liu’s practice centers on sculpture and relief-based forms that explore absence, loss, and the limits of language. Liu works primarily through mold making and casting, processes that shape how she understands transformation, memory, and survival.
Liu is deeply drawn to molting in nature, how animals and insects shed a former skin in order to grow and endure. She sees mold making as a parallel act: a process in which the original form is preserved only through its destruction. The cast retains the body’s exact imprint, reborn through rupture rather than replacement.
Earlier in her practice, Liu skinned reclaimed furniture and domestic objects as metaphors for transitional states, reflecting her own experience of migration and adaptation. Lui’s ongoing series, Inarticulate Trace, emerged after the passing of her father and from her own difficulty articulating pain and loss.
Turning to Chinese herbal medicine as part of that healing process made Liu attentive to how treatment relies on verbal description, how one explains sensations, discomfort, and imbalance. This led her to question whether pain can ever be fully shared or understood, and how one measures their own experience against that of others.
As an immigrant working between languages, this gap feels amplified to Liu. By embedding her own prescribed herbal medicines within the work, she preserves traces of care and treatment as physical residues, materializing grief, care, and embodied memory when words cannot be fully spoken.
Biography
Wen Liu was born in Shanghai, China, and is based in NY, USA. Her art is a collection of reactions to the environments and objects encountered to build her sense of security coming from a foreign land. Questions that drive her work include: What is temporary and what is permanent? What is your place in this temporality and permanence? How do you deal with public recollection versus private memories?
Liu is a 2025 MacDowell Fellow and a 2022 grantee of the Roswell Artist-in-Residence Foundation. She has received multiple awards from the City of Chicago’s Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events (DCASE) and was awarded the Illinois Arts Council 2020 Artist Fellowship. Her past residencies include MASS MoCA, Vermont Studio Center, ACRE Projects, and Hyde Park Art Center.
Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally at institutions such as The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum (CT), Roswell Museum (NM), Lubeznik Center for the Arts (IN), the Chicago Cultural Center, and the National Grand Theater in Beijing.
