SEE HER WORK Installation artist Beili Liu

BY CY WHITE

The conversation is casual. Less a question/answer exchange than a trading of thoughts, ideals, experiences. From it, one gleans who Beili Liu truly is as an artist, a woman, an entrepreneur. Of course, it’s odd to think of artist as businessperson. But Liu visualizes the definition in its barest forms. “Building things up from nothing,” she says. “Let me just dig in and work hard and build something. From that small thing I build it up to something I can be proud of.”

This is how she has always approached her art. Her installations Above, Below (2003) and Recall (2006, 2010) are powerful physical manifestations of the abstract idea of patience. “The term I think about is persistence,” she says. “The sense of commitment. That commitment comes with this desire to offer something. This vision of the paraffin house, it needs to be completed because I can share it.” Drops of water on salt brick. Strands of paraffin wax dangling from a barn roof. Patience. “Grit, if I can say it that way.”

It’s the work of both the artist who in February was named the Fulbright Arctic Chair, one of Fulbright’s Distinguished Chairs programs, and the little girl from Jilin, China, watching the women in her family sew and talk for hours. “Something I remember vividly is to sew multiple layers of cut cloth, to sew it so dense, it becomes so thick and sturdy it becomes the sole[s] of shoes. I think that care, that tactile quality, the texture, the stitches, I think it was carved in my head.”

Duality. Liu’s work is riddled with it. What she calls the “alien and familiar, uncertainty and hope, aggression and stillness.” Woman. Artist. Chinese. Asian American. Immigrant. Daughter. Wife. Mother. Identity is another major aspect of what her work represents. This dance between “duality” and “identity” gives very vivid form and function to her understanding of the woman as a warrior. The feminine as ferocious. “The water that can penetrate stone. I always have to go back to it. When you talk about the strength of women, I see the dripping water as feminine strength.”

James Baldwin said, “To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time.” Liu understands that on the same level as any woman of color living in the United States. It informs her work in the most recent years, a rage mixed with incredible compassion. Her installation Each and Every (2019) is a haunting manifestation of a woman, a mother enraged with the injustice of seeing children separated from their parents. “Obviously, I’m not at the border, I’m not traveling from South and Central America trying to come into this country,” she begins. “But what I am is a mother.

“I’m sitting at my computer and reading the news and thinking about the kids in the cages,” she continues. “I sob. And the sobbing comes from [knowing] my kid is here. I have my coffee, my computer. My comfort. There’s such a dramatic contrast, and there’s guilt and there’s this sense of inability to help, this powerlessness. The sense of I don’t know what to do. And I say as an artist, ‘The only thing I know how to do is to work, is to make something about it.’

“This is also the piece that for the first time I’ve made a project with an object that’s literal,” she continues. “These are figures, clothing. They are exactly what they are even though they’re immersed and stiffened by cement. It’s an honest response. I’m going to bring it out.

“In one interview I did at the earlier stage of my career,” she says, “I talk about how I didn’t want to be political, nor did I want to talk about feminism. At this time in my life…I’m welcoming and embracing all of that. It’s this arriving to become bold and to be willing to say, ‘Yes, okay. My recent work has become more political.’

“My dear friend Kay Whitney, who’s an artist and a writer, we were having this conversation. She reminded me of this sentence. ‘The personal is political.’ My work is about the personal and it is about the political. I accept it and I embrace it. It’s a time where I want to work and be unapologetic about what I’m making.”

Read the full interview at atxwoman.com.

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