Every / Where: Beili Liu
Beili Liu
Beili Liu is a visual artist who creates material-and-process-driven, site-responsive installations and performances. Liu's current research focuses on the complex ecological, political, and environmental concerns facing the Circumpolar North and the urgency of the climate crisis on a planetary scale. Liu states, "I am called to visit the Arctic, a place that embodies the sorrows and hopes of our shared planet." Working with commonplace materials and elements such as thread, needle, scissors, feather, salt, wax, and cement, Liu manipulates their intrinsic qualities to extrapolate complex cultural and environmental narratives. As Kay Whitney wrote about Liu's work in Sculpture Magazine: "Liu's installations leap from obsession and repetition to something profound and expansive, merging the personal with the political...these remarkedly ordinary materials emphasize the disjunctive pairing of subtle beauty and cultural narrative."
Liu has exhibited extensively across the globe, in locations including Norway, Finland, UK, Germany, Italy, Spain, Lithuania, France, Belgium, Poland, Austria, China, Taiwan and across the United States. She has presented solo exhibitions at Hå Gamle Prestegard, Norwegian National Art and Culture Museum; Galerie An Der Pinakothek Der Moderne, Munich, Germany; Museo di Villa Bernasconi, Como, Italy; Elisabeth de Brabant Art Center, Shanghai, China; Chinese Culture Foundation, San Francisco, CA; the Crow Museum of Asian Art, Dallas, TX; Art Museum of Southeast Texas, Beaumont, TX; and Women & Their Work, Austin, TX, among others. Significant group exhibitions at the National Museum for Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C.; New Orleans Art Museum, LA; Grand Rapids Museum of Art, MI; Asian Art Week, NYC; Asia Society Texas Center, Houston, TX; Artpace, San Antonio, TX; San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art, CA; and internationally at the Hamburg Art Week, Germany; M.K. Ciurlionis National Art Museum, Kaunas, Lithuania; Zhejiang Museum of Art, China; Musée de la Dentelle in Caudry, Montrouge, France; Asian Art Week, London, UK; and Bunkier Sztuki Gallery, Kraków, Poland. Liu has created public artworks in Beijing, Jilin and Shanghai, China, Bremerhaven, Germany, Taiwan, San Francisco, CA, Dallas and Austin, TX.
Liu has received numerous fellowships and awards, including the Andrew Carnegie Fellowship (2022-2024); the Pollock Prize for Creativity (2022); the Fulbright Distinguished Arctic Chair Award (Norway, 2021-2022); the Fulbright Finland Inter-Country Grant (2022); the Brian Wall Grant for Sculptors (2022); NYFA Fiscal Sponsorship (2021-2024); Bessie Honoree for Outstanding Visual Design (2020), for Liu’s stage installation at the Lincoln Center, NYC, a New York Times Critic’s Pick (2019); the Joan Mitchell Painters and Sculptors Grant (2016); the National Endowment for the Arts Challenge America Grant through the Museum of Southeast Texas (2014). In 2018, Liu was honored by the Texas Legislature as the Texas State Artist in 3D medium. Liu received the Distinction Award at the Kaunas Biennial, Lithuania (2011), and a San Francisco Mayor’s Award (2008) for her contribution to cultural exchange.
Liu participated in artist residencies at the Hafnarborg Museum of Art, Iceland (2024), Arctic Circle Artists and Scientists Residency, Svalbard, Norway (2023), the Spitsbergen Artists Center, Svalbard, Norway (2023), Seed lab and Polar Lab at the Anchorage Museum of Art, Alaska (2023), the Franconia Sculpture Center, MN (2023), Djerassi Foundation, Woodside, CA (2023, 2006), the Joan Mitchell Center (2019), Studios at MASS MoCA (2019), Facebook Headquarter AIR (2018), Roman Witt Visiting Artist Residency, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (2015), Fundación Valparaíso, Spain (2009), Fiskars AIR, Finland (2007), and Art Farm, NE (2004).
Liu’s work has been featured by PBS Arts in Context series, Sculpture Magazine, Art in America, New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, ArtNews, Art Papers, ArtSlant, Artillery, The Huffington Post, Climate Progress, Public Art Review, Sacchi Review, UK, Helsinki Sanomat News, Finland, Morgenbladet, Norway, China Daily, Yishu, Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art, Hamburg Abendblatt and Vita (Life) Magazine, Italy, among others.
Born in Jilin, China, Beili Liu now lives and works in Austin, Texas. Liu received her MFA degree from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (2003). Liu is the Leslie Waggener Endowed Professor in the College of Fine Arts at the University of Texas at Austin. Liu served on the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) Museum Panel (2019), and her teaching has been endorsed by a UT Regents' Outstanding Teaching Award (2011), selected across the nine institutions of the University of Texas System.