Beili Liu is a Chinese-born US-based visual artist who makes large-scale, process-driven installations that address themes of migration, cultural memory, materiality and labor. Through unconventional use of common place materials such as thread, needle, scissors, fire, and water, Liu extrapolates complex cultural narratives through a hybrid work form that merges site-responsive installation, sculpture, public art, and performance. Liu lives and works in Austin, Texas and is a University of Texas System Regents' Outstanding Teaching Professor at the University of Texas at Austin.
Early life
Beili Liu was born in a farming village in Jilin, China to parents who were among the 16 million sent-down youth during China's Cultural Revolution. After ten years of exile and re-education in the countryside, her parents relocated to the Northeast Chinese industrial city of Shenyang. In 1989, one month before the Tiananmen Square Protests, her family migrated to the southern coastal city of Shenzhen, a major manufacturing center and economic hub bordering Hong Kong and one of four "Special Economic Zones" designated at the early stage of Chinese economic reform.
Early in Liu's career senior critic Janet Kaplos remarked in Art in America that Liu's installations were "materially simple but metaphorically rich." DeWitt Cheng, arts critic for Artillery, noted in 2012 that "The idea of aggression and danger halted by gentle restraint is... embodied" in Liu's site-specific installations. Beili Liu has held solo exhibitions at the Crow Museum of Asian Art, Dallas, Texas, Galerie An Der Pinakothek Der Moderne, Munich, Germany,, Norwegian National Art and Culture Center, Hua Gallery, London, UK, Elisabeth de Brabant Art Center, Shanghai, China, and the Chinese Culture Foundation, San Francisco. Liu's work has been showcased in group exhibitions at the Asia Society Texas Center, Bunkier Sztuki Gallery, Kraków, Poland, Hangzhou Triennial of Fiber Art. Zhejiang Art Museum, China, National Museum for Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C., Hamburg Art Week, Germany, the Kaunas Biennale, Lithuania, and the 23rd and 25th Miniartextil International Contemporary Fiber Art exhibitions in Como, Italy.
Honors and grants
Beili Liu is a 2016 Joan Mitchell Painters and Sculptors Grant recipient. Liu has been designated the 2018 Texas State Artist in 3D medium by the Texas State Legislature and the Texas Commission on The Arts. Beili Liu's work has received support from the National Endowment for the Arts Challenge America Grant for her exhibition at the Art Museum of Southeast Texas, 2014. Liu's public art project Sky Bridge was named Best Public Art Installation by KQED. In 2013, Liu was invited by Women & Their Work to create a collaborative public art project THIRST, which was supported in part by a Robert Rauschenberg Foundation Artistic Innovation and Collaboration Grant. Liu has held a number of artist residency fellowships, including the Joan Mitchell Center, Studios at MASS MoCA, Facebook AIR, Austin TX, Fiskars AIR, Finland, Djerassi Foundation, Woodside, CA, and Fundación Valparaíso, Spain, Art Farm, Nebraska. She received a Distinction award at the Kaunas Biennial Lithuania, and was honored by a San Francisco Mayor's Award for her contribution to cultural exchange.
