Crystal Liu was born in Toronto, Canada, in 1980 to Chinese immigrants. Liu majored in photography at Ontario College of Art & Design and received an MFA at the San Francisco Art Institute in 2005. She has shown her work in solo exhibitions at Morgan Lehman (New York, NY); Galerie Du Monde (Hong Kong); Hosfelt Gallery (San Francisco, CA); and Leo Kamen Gallery (Toronto, Canada). Liu’s work is included in prestigious collections such as The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (California); The US Embassy Beijing Art Collection (Beijing, China); The City of San Francisco (San Francisco, California); The Progressive Art Collection (Mayfield Village, Ohio); and The Fidelity Art Collection (Boston, Massachusetts); among others. The artist lives and works in Toronto.
Artist Statement:
Liu constructs landscapes as metaphors for the intangible forces that drive human beings from within. Tying intimately with her emotional states, Liu derives the narratives of intention and desire with teetering optimism through her portrayal of the moon, stars, mountains and rocks in her paintings. The complexities of life, from hopefulness to desolation, are carefully infused into the landscapes of her work, alluding to truths from the artist’s own private life. She precisely applies clusters of dots in her paintings, which become a signature surface texture. She also lets the paint take their own course when she uses them with ink washes and marbling techniques, making the elements in her paintings sprout, like the nature of life. The swirls of marbleized paint echo the heritage art of Chinese ink paintings. The distinct edged collage mimics the hard and enormous stones, mountains and cliffs of the natural world, providing shelter and protection, and elevating other forms, such as birch trees and chrysanthemum flowers, closer to the moon.