Beili Liu has created art with everything from thread to bread to shotgun shells. And with her creative work as a foundation, she launches into other artistic ventures with a similarly open mind.
Liu, an assistant professor of art and recipient of Eastern Michigan University's 2008 Ronald W. Collins Distinguished Faculty Award for Creative Activity, sets herself apart — even within EMU's highly-regarded art department — with her range, artistic ambition and drive.
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WEAVING ART: (above, from left) Beili Liu, an EMU
assistant professor of art, helps student Jessica
Vankoningsveld, a junior from South Lyon, build a
chair out of sticks in Liu's "3-D Design" class. Liu
received this year's Ronald W. Collins Distinguished
Faculty Award for Creative Activity. |
"She just gets out there," said Tom Venner, head of EMU's Art Department, who nominated Liu." We've got people sending their work out there, but she's taking herself out there. In addition to the extremely high quality of her work, she's just so involved, physically and time-wise. The fact that she keeps it all together is so impressive."
Liu often collaborates with artists in the Detroit area and, unlike many who create, she also curates shows, cultivating and communicating an expertise about other artists' work. Her own work is often playful and sometimes changes between the beginning of a show and the end. In 2005, she created a 20-foot-long wall out of slices of white bread for a University of Michigan dining hall. The next year, she laid out a 6'x6' grid of shotgun shells filled with salt water and, over time, the rims of the shells blossomed with salt crystals.
Liu teaches 3-D and computer design — foundational classes in which she uses her own work as examples to help inexperienced art students build key skills and concepts.
Each summer, she's located a residency program where she could focus and recharge creatively. Fellowships and research award grants have taken her to Nebraska, California, Finland and China. Each fall, she brings new insights back to her students.
She's currently working on a solo exhibition for the Chinese Culture Center of San Francisco, due to open in May. Called "Lure," the work is based on a legend that says a red thread, tied at the ankle, connects each baby to the person they're destined to be with. At the appropriate time, the creator pulls on the thread and draws the two lovers closer to each other.
Liu's installation uses small red discs made from tightly spiraled thread. The discs hang just above the floor like lily pads on a pond, suspended by a needle and thread. Each piece of red thread makes two discs, with several feet of loose thread lying on the floor between them. The loose threads tangle on the floor, making it less clear just which discs belong together.
Born and raised in China, with art degrees from the University of Tennessee and University of Michigan, Liu's artwork follows two paths. Sometimes, it taps into Chinese culture; at other times, she explores and experiments with materials. And sometimes the two lines converge, as they have in a series of work she calls her "house phase."
During a summer residency in 2004, Liu installed an adobe brick house at Art Farm in Marquette, Nebraska. The house is based on thone her parents built in a northern Chinese village during the Cultural Revolution. It also is the same house where Liu was born.
"That was a revisit to my parents' experience and my experience in this new environment," she said. "It was a symbolic self-portrait."
More recently, Liu recreated a house structure by stretching paraffin wax into thin, fragile, eight-foot-long drips, which were then hung from above to form the swaying, ethereal "walls" of a house. The piece, called "Recall", imparts the idea of home as a fragile and uncertain thing. Visitors to the house have broken some of the strands and Liu considers those natural occurrences as part of the piece.
"The quality of the material is pretty boring and industrial but, by transforming it into this long, delicate line, it becomes much more organic," Liu said. "It sways in the air and has all (of) these subtle qualities that add to the final piece. We're seeking that moment where the material can activate the viewer's response."
To view Liu's diverse work, go to www.beililiu.com
