LIU Yu
Born in Taiwan, works and lived in Taipei, LIU Yu is an artist and engaged in many art-related productions and social activities. She is sentimental, sensitive, intuitional and owner of sharply accurate personal phrases like other image generation young people born in the 80s. LIU grew up indulging in great number of movies, all the narratives, scripts, image languages, fictional plots have become her approaches towards this world. She has been chasing irrational, unusual, fantastic and accidental experiences in her works. Her major solo exhibition LA “Several Ways to Believe, “The ship of fools mooring at the train station”, “Life rented from STARFLY” at Eslite Art Studio has received 14th Taishin Art Award first season nomination. Double solo show with Wu Sih-chin “Two Ends” received honorable mention in Taipei Arts Awards, 2012. She has participated in Taiwan Biennial of National Taiwan Fine Art Museum, theme exhibition “Life is a metaphor, you are the metaphor” in Artist Fair, “Unknown Refraction” in Artist Fair. She is also included in many overseas group shows, such as “NEW DIRECTIONS ＃2 TRANS-PLAX” in Tokyo and “Discomfort’s Calling” in the Czech Republic.
- Location USA / Los Angeles
- Year of the Grant 2016
- Residency 18th Street Arts Center
- Work Gold Mining History
- Personal Website LIU Yu's Personal Website
Project in residency: Gold Mining History
This project originated from my research on vagrants in Taiwan. Based on my frequent interaction with these people between 2015 and 2016, I got to know the Taipei Railway Station, a public space that has become a shelter for vagrants who stay there for its available resources, friendly environment and regional connections. The space of this station is ergo open to interpretation. In the following steps, I will try to adopt the first-person perspective of these people, and thereby re-interpret this public space’s attributes and potentials.
I gained invaluable experience as an artist-in-residence at 18 Street Art Center. In addition to studying the ethnic tension endemic in Taiwan, I not only seized this exciting opportunity to immerse myself in a foreign country’s experience and historical context, but also took an intriguing glimpse at the situations of different ethnic groups in the country. Los Angeles, the host city of my residency, is located in an area with mild climate, rich resources, as well as humanistic and ethnic diversity, which is why it has become the “capital of vagrants,” where the number of vagrants jumped to 26,000 by 2016. The vagrant problem in the United States arises from capitalism and utilitarianism that this country has long espoused, while the immediate cause lies in industry offshoring, inadequate supply of cheap housing, elevated middle-class unemployment rate and soaring cost of living since the 1970s. Unfortunately, the U.S. government hasn’t taken effective remedial measures to date, making many veterans and the underprivileged homeless because they cannot afford the cost.