Presented by the New York Studio School

March 4 - April 16, 2023

Borrowing its title from one of Liu’s most recent paintings, the exhibition explores themes of family, memory, and identity in the artist’s large-scale paintings and her “Lost and Found” series.

Highlighted in this exhibition were Liu’s two recent paintings What Was and What Stays. The exhibition essay describes these as ‘a turn toward a more graphic idiom that extends her explorations of figure and ground, revelation and concealment… In What Stays, Liu superimposes her mother’s outline upon a gesturally painted playground scene based on a photograph from Liu’s childhood. A girl approaches the end of a vertiginous slide and is about to return to the stability of the earth. A boy beside her stands with his back to the viewer, looking into the cityscape beyond. The vertical pole around which the spiral slide twists tethers together the foreground of the woman with the scene behind, forming a sort of spinal column as the radiating steps branch out like ribs across her hollow form. The obliviousness of the children to the woman casts her relationship to them in an ambiguous light—an ambivalent absence and presence undergirding their childhood. Unlike the earlier body of work, these paintings retain rather than obscure the referents of Liu’s past, generously and honestly delving into the complexities of her autobiography.”