Xizi Liu

Region: Midwest

My paintings focus on sites of consumption and production in the contemporary environment, and explore capitalist consumerism. The subjects I choose are deeply rooted in my experience growing up amidst frenzied transformations in China, with its subsequent unbearable urban density.

In my works, I use stylized painting methods to represent the architectures of consumption, flattening reality both literally and metaphorically. Through a mechanical vision, the paintings explore, critique, and contemplate attitudes concerning consumerism and mass production. They examine the mechanization of the architecture of consumption—how it reinforces habits.

These paintings also portray the power of information transmission through an unrevealed language and the painterly gesture, which replaces the alphabet in non-places—a place, not a social or physical space, that lacks the traditional attributes of space.