An Te Liu
Liu has become well known for his predominantly sculptural practice that involves a creative and insightful use of everyday found objects that are reconfigured into often playful yet critical commentaries on the ideals of modernism.
Liu completed his M. Arch at the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc), Los Angeles in 1995, where he was awarded Outstanding Graduate Thesis.
[1] Liu's work "takes as its starting point the history of twentieth-century architecture and its relationship to parallel or oblique modes of enquiry during the same era: the utopian social and theoretical goals of architecture; the relationship of cultural forms to the imagined environment and the organisation and housing of bodies; the history of the appliance and the product; the economies of obsolescence that undergird mass-production.
Liu has participated in group exhibitions such as Nothing Stable Under Heaven (San Francisco Museum of Modern Art), Terminal P (La Panacée, Montpellier), Sticky Fingers (Arsenal Contemporary, New York), Der Brancusi Effekt (Kunsthalle Vienna; cat.
The Tropos series (2016) embodies tributes to four female figures from the modern age: Gertrude Stein, Djuna Barnes, Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven and Mina Loy.
Stein, artistically, was known for working with a self-limited range of words that were repeated and manipulated in order to stretch out the possible number of meanings and associations.
In each Tropos ( a Greek term for “turn” and indicating change) the repetition, twisting, and mirroring of the same elements speaks to the playful and experimental approach to art adopted by these four figures, and also to their vivid personalities.
(excerpt from Shannon Anderson, An Te Liu: Tradition and the Historical Sense[3]) The 2013 exhibition Mono No Ma at the Gardiner Museum, Toronto comprises numerous ceramic works that specifically explore the space around things.
Drawn at first to the burnished surfaces and anthropomorphic features of funerary ware in the Gardiner’s Ancient Americas collection, Liu has transformed discarded styrofoam packing from consumer goods into ceramic sculptures that evoke a multiplicity of references.
As part of the Leona Drive[4] group exhibition in Toronto, Liu refashioned a vacant suburban tract house as a life-sized Monopoly piece.
In an interview with Canadian Art editor Richard Rhodes, Liu states that he was first commissioned to do this project "at the height of the subprime mortgage crisis".
[5] He notes that the suburban tract house reduced to its iconic form, provides a frame of reference for understanding the financial crisis as an event caused by the trading of mortgages as if they were pieces in a Monopoly game.
By using the tract house as a basic compositional unit for a wallpaper pattern, Liu ironically renders the modular design aspirations of the suburbs as mere decor.
Liu combines "formal ingenuity with conceptual clarity"[7] to show that the preference in 20th century industrial design for clean, functional lines was influenced by the wider concerns of modernism.
