The Henry Radford Hope School of Fine Arts welcomed guest artist Beili Liu to speak Wednesday night about her work as an installation artist.
About 50 students and IU faculty members watched Liu’s presentation of her many installations.
The common themes shared throughout her works were culture, female empowerment and connection, she said.
Liu said she connects with the art she makes by following two lines throughout her process. The first idea she incorporates is playing with different materials. The second is looking at her cultural history and experience with China.
“This is the underlying theme of my practice, where I am looking at those small human connections,” Liu said.
Beginning with all three ideas she had of connection, culture and women empowerment, Liu said one of her earliest projects was spent on the Art Farm in Nebraska.
Liu created a replica of her parents’ home when they lived in the rural countryside of China.
The type of house Liu crafted was the same as a first house a Chinese man would build for himself, she said.
“As a Chinese daughter it was really empowering to come up with this idea and build it on my own,” Liu said.
For Liu’s second project she followed the idea of building a house for the installation “Recall.”
However, Liu said instead of using common materials like the adobe brick from the first house she used paraffin wax.
Liu said she loved watching people walk through the exhibit, noticing their movements and emotions as they experienced her artwork.
As some visitors walked through wax broke off but Liu said she was not bothered by it.
“I think it shows the fragility of our home, of the things we long for so much but cannot hold with our hand,” Liu said.
Continuing along with the theme of culture, Liu said she loves the Chinese legend of the red thread. Liu was inspired by this legend to use red thread when she created her “Lure Series.”
“The legend says when we are born we are connected with our soulmate with an invisible red thread,” Liu said. “As time goes on it gets pulled, and we get closer to them.”
Liu said her feeling of connection is also clear in her installation “Light as a Feather.”
Liu said the installation used almost 10,000 feathers to represent refugees and their struggles.
Each feather was hand dipped in tar to show the heavy weight of obstacles.
“There must be something we can do,” Liu said. “The inability to help is weighing on all of our minds.”
Liu will be having an opening reception for “After All Mending the Sky,” on Friday at the Grunwald Gallery.
In this series she uses silk as raw material from Chinese culture and the needle and thread refers to healing and mending.
Liu said this creation is based on a Chinese legend where the woman creator of mankind mended the sky to protect the humans when there was a big flood approaching.
“It is an idea enabling humanity to continue,” Liu said.
