Beili Liu

For the past fifteen years, I have been working with material-and-process-driven, site-responsive installations. Though my work often stems from culturally specific materials and emblems, I am drawn by the “in between”— a duality indefinable by cultural boundaries. I am interested in the resonating human experiences and concerns: encounters and assimilations, fluxes and displacements, the intimacy of memories and the gravity of time.

My latest body of work, Equilibrium Series, looks at fusing the seemingly opposite into one, and seeking the impossible balance between contradicting and confluent forces. I am intrigued by multifaceted dichotomies: lightness versus heft; fragility contrasted with mass; and chaos balanced by quiet order. Equilibrium Series carries within it the inherent influence of Eastern philosophies seeking the ultimate balance in life, and within oneself. It marks a significant expansion of my practice: materiality, spatial intervention, the artist’s body, and feminist concerns are intertwined into a narrative of motion and stillness, tension and calm.

My making process, at its heart, is concerned with the hand-made. I need the time of solitude to simply lose myself in the intuitive rhythms of my hands at work—my hands seem to know things my mind does not—they have an ability, perhaps a memory of making from thousands of years passed. Time and gravity remain integral to everything I make. The ephemeral quality of my materials speaks of impermanence, an underlying truth I see in all things in life.

As an artist, I am driven by the ongoing urge to illustrate a balance that brings together the alien and the familiar, uncertainty and hope, aggression and stillness: the yielding resilience that I see as the feminine strength, overcoming great obstacles, like dripping water eventually penetrates stone.