'Making Home' Performance and Artist Talk: Beili Liu

To accompany her installation Each and Every in the exhibition Making Home: Artists and Immigration, artist Beili Liu joins Asia Society Texas for a performance and artist talk. As guests experience the gallery installation, the artist sits in contemplative silence during her performance, mending damaged and worn children's clothing. She repairs the items as an act of restoration in response to the experiences of children immigration at the southern U.S. border. The performance will be followed by an artist talk and audience Q&A.

Making Home: Artists and Immigration focuses on immigration and related themes through the works of Phung Huynh, Beili Liu, Tuan Andrew Nguyen, and Amanda Phingbodhipakkiya. The exhibition engages with the individual, lived experiences of immigration through the paintings, prints, drawings, sculptures, and installations of the four featured artists. Making Home centers the complexities of deeply personal histories of immigration, as the artists consider the topics of intergenerationality, the repercussions of colonial histories, dislocation, memory, otherness, belonging, and resilience.

About the Artist

Beili Liu is a visual artist who creates material-and-process-driven, site-responsive installations. Working with commonplace materials such as thread, needle, scissors, feather, salt, wax, and cement, Liu manipulates their intrinsic qualities to extrapolate complex cultural narratives. As Kay Whitney wrote about Liu's work in Sculpture Magazine: "Liu's installations leap from obsession and repetition to something profound and expansive, merging the personal with the political."

Liu exhibits internationally in locations including Norway, Finland, UK, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Lithuania, China, Poland, Taiwan, and across the United States, with solo exhibitions at venues including Galerie An Der Pinakothek Der Moderne, Munich, Germany, Elisabeth de Brabant Art Center, Shanghai, China, Chinese Culture Foundation, San Francisco, CA, the Crow Museum of Asian Art, Dallas, TX, Art Museum of Southeast Texas, Beaumont, TX, and Women & Their Work, Austin, TX. Her work has received support from numerous grants, fellowships, and awards including: Fulbright Arctic Chair, a Fulbright Distinguished Scholar Award, Norway (2021-2022), New York Foundation for the Arts Fiscal Sponsorship (2021), and Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors Grant (2016). Liu has been honored by the Texas Legislature and the Texas Commission on the Arts as the Texas State Artist (2018, 3D). Liu's work has been featured by PBS Arts in Context series, Sculpture Magazine, Art in America, New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Huffington Post, and ARTnews, among others.

Born in Jilin, China, Beili Liu now lives and works in Austin, Texas. Liu received her MFA degree from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (2003). Liu is an Institute for the Humanities Fellow (2020-2022) and the Leslie Waggener Endowed Professor in the College of Fine Arts at the University of Texas at Austin.

Website: http://beililiu.com/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/beililiu/