Jen Liu
Born 1976, New York, USA
Lives and works Brooklyn, New York, USA

Jen Liu's paintings on paper, videos and installations draw on diverse histories to construct fictions that connect with and interrogate contemporary society. For each inter-related series Liu develops texts that begin with a single line of enquiry, such as 'the environment gets worse', which metamorphosise into giant, abstract, dazzlingly seductive watercolours, shot through with sampling, salvaging and recycling from modernism to constructivism. In association with these she devises and produces all aspects of her films (rarely featuring dialogue), resulting in dream-like non-linear narratives with fantastical props and costumes, infused with a delicious reverie of music and the absurd, but which always retain a melancholia that subverts and enhances our observations in the work and the worlds we inhabit. She is currently developing a timeline of geometric abstraction in the 20th century, exploring a fictional near-future of environmental degradation, in which 'there is nothing good to look at anymore'.

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