Caroline Liu

Artist Statement

I am a Chinese American multidisciplinary artist working across painting, drawing, sculpture, installation, and murals. My practice is grounded in my relationship to ancestry, migration, and cultural memory. Rather than attempting to reconstruct the past, I approach history as something living; full of gaps, contradictions, and silences that invite questioning and reshaping.

My visual language draws from both realism and surrealism, creating densely layered environments that blur the boundaries between light and dark, beauty and unease. Inspired by my own memories, nostalgia, and identity, I incorporate elements from Chinese mythology and traditional symbolism to reflect on the complexities of the human experience. The use of symbology and guardian spirits invite viewers into rich and immersive worlds, sparking larger conversations around grief and joy, love and loss, past chaos and present contemplation.

In my series Chinatown of the Sierra Nevada Mountains, I confronted the suffering of Chinese railroad laborers using symbolism to restore dignity and presence to those rendered faceless. In my installation The Chinese Garden, I explored a Cantonese family’s garden in the late 1800s in southern New Mexico and how the family cultivated beauty and sustenance amid exclusion and racial violence. In my series of drawings Meditation / Migration, I examine my relationship to ghosts, both as ancestors and the spirits we carry within ourselves. These works become vessels for memory, mourning, and guarded hope, holding space for love, loss, and surrendering.

My work balances the tension between remembrance and reckoning, acknowledgment and care, confronting what is hidden while honoring what was endured.