DALLAS, TX.- The Crow Museum of Asian Art of The University of Texas at Dallas has announced a landmark, three-year series of exhibitions honoring the cultural traditions of Asia with new contemporary voices from Texas women. The Texas Asian Women Artists Series will be the first major series that the Crow Museum debuts as a university-affiliated museum.
The Texas Asian Women Artists Series is dedicated to elevating and making visible the work of emerging and established Texas-based contemporary Asian women artists. The artists presented in this program focus on contemporary issues in Texas and abroad, giving voice to multifaceted, humanized stories of identity, place, tradition and modernity.
The Texas-based artists chosen for the major exhibition series are Chinese artist Beili Liu of Austin, Japanese artist Kana Harada of Dallas and South Korean artist JooYoung Choi of Houston. Liu, Harada and Choi’s works will be presented in 2020, 2021 and 2022, respectively.
“Creating a platform for Asian women in art is something that the Crow Museum has wanted to do for years,” said Amy Lewis Hofland, director of the Crow Museum of Asian Art of The University of Texas at Dallas. “We’re absolutely delighted to bring to the forefront the very best women contemporary artists in Texas who draw upon their Asian-American heritage to express their stories and points of view in visionary and meaningful ways.”
Kicking off the series is the exhibition Beili Liu: One and Another featuring two monumental works from Austin-based artist and UT-Austin art professor Beili Liu. Free and open to the public, the exhibition runs Jan. 18-Aug. 16, 2020, at the Crow Museum of Asian Art museum, located in the Dallas Arts District at 2010 Flora St., Dallas 75201.
In her first major exhibition in Dallas, Liu presents two major works – Lure/Dallas and Each and Every/Dallas – in Gallery 1 and the Mezzanine, respectively. Additionally, the Museum will host artist performances for Each and Every/Dallas and Artist Talks later this spring. Beili Liu’s artist performance is scheduled for March 12 at the Crow Museum.
Liu is a visual artist who creates material and process-driven, site-responsive installations. Working with everyday materials and elements such as thread, scissors, paper, stone, fire and water, she manipulates their intrinsic qualities to extrapolate complex cultural narratives that reflect not only her Chinese cultural heritage and personal experiences but the societal traumas associated with migration and diaspora.
Her work has been exhibited in Asia, Europe and across the United States, and she has held solo exhibitions at venues such as the Ha Gamle Prestegard, Norwegian National Art and Culture Center, Galerie An Der Pinakothek Der Moderne, Munich, Germany, and the Chinese Culture Foundation, San Francisco. She also participated in significant group exhibitions at venues including the National Museum for Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C., Hangzhou Fiber Art Triennial, Zhijing Art Museum, China, and Kaunas Biennale, Lithuania.
Liu was awarded the 2016 Joan Mitchell Painters and Sculptors Grant and named the 2018 Texas State Artist in 3D medium by the Texas State Legislature and the Texas Commission on the Arts. Liu’s work has received support from the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation Artistic Innovation and Collaboration Grant (Women and Their Work, 2013) and the National Endowment for the Arts (Museum of Southeast Texas, 2014).
Born in Jilin, China, Liu now lives and works in Austin. She received her MFA from The University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and is currently a Professor of Art at The University of Texas at Austin.
The curator of this exhibition and the Texas Asian Women Artists Series is Jacqueline Chao, Ph.D., senior curator of Asian Art for the Crow Museum of Asian Art.
“Beili Liu is an enormously talented artist and educator whose thoughtful, site-responsive works are visually inspiring and breath-taking,” said Dr. Chao. “The goal of this series is to celebrate the strength and diversity of work being produced by Asian women artists based in Texas today. Her work was the perfect choice to launch this series.”
Each and Every/Dallas
Installation and Performance
Each and Every/Dallas is a large-scale, site-responsive installation and performance project consisting of hundreds of articles of children’s clothing that have been preserved and quieted by industrial cement. Organized to line the gallery floor, yet poised just inches above the ground, the work occupies a rectilinear space that is expansive and penetrates the building’s structure. Though the garments have been transformed by cement, they maintain the drapes, folds and materiality familiar to fabric. Above the expanse of clothing, hundreds of lines of cement-dipped thread hang in an organic sequence, occupying the vertical space between the floor and ceiling, guiding the viewer’s eyes upwards, offering a sense of hope.
In conjunction with this installation, Liu will incorporate 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. (Performance dates and times forthcoming).
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. As the title and work suggest, Each and Every/Dallas calls attention back to the individual experiences of these children and their families, generating space for empathy and understanding.
Lure/Dallas
Site-responsive Installation
The Lure/Dallas installation series borrows from the ancient Chinese legend of The Red Thread, which tells that when children are born, invisible red threads connect them to their soul mates. Through the years of their lives, they come closer and eventually find each other, overcoming great social divides or physical distances.
The installation uses thousands of hand-coiled disks of red thread, each pierced at the center by a single sewing needle, enabling its suspension from the ceiling. A disk may be connected to another, as a pair, and a pair of disks is made from a single thread. Subtle air currents set the red thread coils swaying and turning slowly as the loose strands of thread on the floor drift and become entangled.
Each composition of the series is designed to carefully respond to the given space and its architectural specificities. Unique compositions of the Lure Series have been previously shown in San Francisco; Los Angeles; Buffalo; Shanghai, China; Fiskars, Finland; Kaunas, Lithuania; Munich, Germany; London; Como, Italy, and Kraków, Poland, among others.
“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,” said Liu.
Beili Liu: One and Another is organized by the Crow Museum of Asian Art of The University of Texas at Dallas.
