Liu Shiyuan

Born in 1985 in Beijing, Liu Shiyuan is now based in both Beijing and Copenhagen. Having grown up in China during a phase of unprecedented technological advances, global commercialization and popular culture assimilation, and later traveling and living between China, the U.S. and Europe, Liu adapted and cultivated an innate sensibility unique to the contemporary Chinese diaspora. Active since 2007, Liu’s practice explores a complex, transcultural 'identity confusion'—a lack of any specific identity confinement, so to speak, wherein one’s lived experience and self-understanding derive from fluctuating components of rationality and mystery, reality and fiction. Employing both found and made material, her work makes satirical and exaggerated use of de- and re-contexulized, unassuming fragments extracted from or mimicking the internet and the quotidian, speaking of an emerging, and in ways increasingly disoriented, generation born into an information matrix that tells the story of who they are and what they desire. Despite her Chinese nationality, Liu’s perspective isn’t defined or constrained by any one cultural subjectivity. Rather, her life and work together embody a young and provocative approach entrenched in and responding to a world of social and digital ’nomads’ in the making.