Meet Yefu Liu

Today we’d like to introduce you to Yefu Liu.

Hi Yefu, thanks for sharing your story with us. To start, maybe you can tell our readers some of your backstory.
I studied drawing and painting since I was a kid, and I got my BA in painting from Capital Normal University in Beijing in 2009 and got my MFA in Photographic and Electronic Media from Maryland Institute College of Art in 2014. After that, I started my professional career as an artist.

We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
For me, the road is smooth because the opportunity is always there. But the struggles are in everyone’s inner self. I think the artists have to convince themself to understand that their work usually stands with the grassroots but actually consumed by the wealthy one. To be honest, some artists today usually becoming a person that they criticize about in the beginning.

Thanks – so what else should our readers know about your work and what you’re currently focused on?
My work focuses on video, sound, drawing and mixed media. Influenced by Asian folk culture, I’m interested in the expression of black humor with a stream-of-consciousness style, playfully commenting on the chaos and restlessness of social realities. By shooting daily life scenes, combined with carefully hand-carving products in line with his fictional plot, I’m mapping the ideology and stereotypes brought by history, nationality, and memory. Within my work, I probe the imagined interior and exterior with a highly charged visual language and insist on responding to the division of the contemporary world below secular life in this land. I’m trying to envision the notion of “global-local” in secular and matter-of-fact language that poignantly points out the existing conflicts between the conservatives and liberals, the elites and the grassroots, as well as the reflexivity of ideology and their unanimous idleness in reality. By blurring the boundary on the notion of region and time, my work demonstrates the core values and violent essence of the emergence of a modernization process serving the rule and national development.

What has been the most important lesson you’ve learned along your journey?
Do more work, say less things.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://cargocollective.com/yefuliu
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/liu_yefu/

Image Credits
Image courtesy of the artist and Magician Space, Beijing