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.