First-Year Core Program Director and Studio Art Professor Beili Liu presents Beili Liu: One and Another, the inaugural The Crow Museum of Asian Art of The University of Texas at Dallas exhibition in a new multi-year series dedicated to making visible the work of emerging and established Texas-based contemporary Asian women artists. The series, titled Texas Asian Women Artists Series, is also the first major series that the Crow Museum debuts as a university-affiliated museum.
For One and Another, Liu has created two site-responsive installations, Lure/Dallas and Each and Every/Dallas that together touch on the theme of human connection. Through her practice, Liu subjects commonplace materials to unorthodox processes, extrapolating complex cultural narratives around the trauma associated with migration and diaspora.
A previous iteration of Each and Every/Dallas was exhibited at MadArt Seattle, whose director, Emily Kelly, knew of Liu's work from her time in graduate school for Art Education at The University of Texas at Austin. The installation at The Crow Museum consists of hundreds of articles of children’s clothing that have been dipped in industrial cement and organized in a rectilinear space on the gallery floor. "Here, the artist lays out a more pointed discussion of humanity," writes Natalie Gempel for D Magazine. "The room is filled with flattened pieces of children’s clothing, dipped in colorless cement and arranged in a rectangle hovering above the floor. Cement-coated threads hang from the ceiling like dull needles, stopping inches above the garments
It’s a deeply personal project for Liu, one that started with collecting her young daughter’s hand-me-downs without a specific purpose in mind. When the Trump administration’s zero tolerance immigration policy was introduced, she decided to use those pieces, in addition to clothing donated at her daughter’s school and by fellow artist-parents, to speak out.
Speaking to Patron Magazine, Liu said about the work, "I make environments that resonate with the experience of migration and cultural memory. My work looks at fusing together the seemingly opposite in life: alien and familiar, uncertainty and hope, aggression and stillness―the yielding resilience that I see as the feminine strength, overcoming great obstacles, like dripping water that eventually penetrates stone.”
Beili Liu: One and Another is on view from January 18 to August 16, 2020. Associate events include:
Art, Refugee Policy, Human Rights
March 12, 2020
2PM
Artist Lecture and panel conversation. Organized by Crow Museum of Asian Art of the University of Texas at Dallas, Refugee Services Texas, UTD School of Economic, Political and Policy Sciences, School of Arts and Humanities, School of Arts, Technology, and Emerging Communication, Edith O’Donnell Institute of Art History, and UTD Center for Asian Studies.
Each and Every Artist Performance
March 12, 2020
6 - 7 PM
March 13, 2020
12 - 1 PM
Austin-based visual artist Beili Liu incorporates a performance in which she sits in protest alongside the installation in silent meditation, mending worn articles of brightly-colored clothing, and using the repetitive act of mending cloth to explore cultural ideas of feminine labor, healing and hope. As an artist, mother and immigrant, the installation and corresponding performance piece was conceptualized in response to the migrant children crisis and the separation of migrant children from their parents at the southern border of the United States.