LIFE & DOCUMENTS
Biography
Life, Art and Public Practice
From his early experiences in northwestern Sichuan and his years of teaching to independent practice in Beijing and social engagement and nonprofit arts work in New York, Qiming Liu’s life and art have remained closely connected. This account traces that developing practice through the available CV, interviews, works and project documents.
This biography has been edited by the archive from the available artist CV, interviews, works, project documents and signed critical writing. It is not a previously published external biography. Recollections and critical interpretations retain their attribution, and project proposals are not treated as evidence that every planned action was completed. The account will be expanded as further documents become available; both language versions are editorial texts prepared for this archive.
—1995
Early Life and Art Education
In The Art of Liu Qi, published in Mianyang Daily in 2001, He Duojun describes the artist’s childhood in rural northwestern Sichuan and identifies the countryside as an early source of his artistic experience. In a 2009 interview with Li Jianzhang, Liu recalled drawing freely from primary school, with his family giving him room to follow his interests. In junior secondary school, he began formal study of drawing, color and ink painting.
Liu graduated from the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute in 1995. The surviving work archive includes paintings and mixed-media works from 1994 and 1995, among them China’s “Jing” (井) Culture, Culture · Imagery, Eating, Commemorative Group Portrait and Positioning. Some early works and the original 2001 newspaper essay use his historical name, Liu Qi. The archive retains those original credits as part of the documents’ historical record.
1995–2006
Teaching, the Plateau and the City
From 1995 to 2006, Liu taught at higher education institutions in China while continuing to make art. In his 2009 interview with 99 Art, he described teaching at Aba Teachers College and later at Southwest University of Science and Technology, emphasizing the time and attention that teaching and exchanges with students required. Looking back, he understood the subsequent move to independent practice primarily as a change in his working rhythm and control over his time.
He Duojun’s 2001 essay records that Liu went to teach in Aba after graduation and established the Highland Red art studio with colleagues during his first winter on the plateau. He later traveled into Tibetan and Qiang areas and set up a painting studio in Chengdu, frequently moving between the plateau and the city. He Duojun connects the contrast between these experiences with the artist’s approach to observing urban life; this remains the critic’s interpretation of the relationship between Liu’s life and work.
The surviving paintings show a range of subjects and approaches from these years. Mask · State (1996), Mountains No. 3 (1998), the Lighthouse · Shadow series (1999), Fading Landscape (2004) and Qualification Certificate No. 2 (2005) are all represented in the work archive. He Duojun considers both the urban figures in the early works and Liu’s experiences on the plateau, stressing that the artist did not define himself as a painter belonging to a single region.
2006–2009
Beijing: Independent Practice and Personal History
In 2006, Liu left his university teaching position and moved to Beijing to work as an independent artist. He rented a studio in Suojia Village and curated Restart—Suojia Village · Beijing International Art Camp in 2007. His 2009 interview with Li Jianzhang recounts the demolition notice he encountered when leasing the studio, alongside the preparation of the exhibition, collaboration with other artists and distribution of material to the media. Everyday life in Suojia Village and its insecure working spaces also gave him concrete experience from which to discuss artists’ circumstances.
Paintings from this period, including My 1976, My 1989, Landscapes of Memory and Sea of Clouds Without a View, bring personal memory into contact with historical subjects. In his 2008 essay Preserving Personal Historical Memory, Wang Lin interprets these works as approaching history through individual psychological experience and recollection rather than directly reenacting events. In Recording History in Painting, Wang Yaqing considers how clouds, color and red imagery bring obscured history into view. The two essays preserve distinct critical responses to this stage of Liu’s work.
The 2009 interview with 99 Art records Liu’s experiments with new materials and forms. He described devoting more time to performance, experimental video, documentary filmmaking and installation. Completed that year, the 103-minute digital documentary 512: The Case of Xinjian Primary School draws on videos and photographs from the internet, focusing on rescue efforts after the school’s collapse in Dujiangyan during the 2008 earthquake. Historical memory and contemporary catastrophe thus appear in documents of his work across different media.
2010–2016
Performance, Networks and Everyday Life
Sensitive Words (2010) connects a performance in the studio with subsequent conversations outdoors. The artist’s plan includes wearing a mask bearing the title, speaking and writing the words, abstaining from food and drink, suspending blog updates and sitting silently before the text. Conversations with different groups were conceived as an extension of the work. The surviving plan, photographs and texts show how he made restrictions on expression the subject of performance and exchange.
In 2013, STUDIO67 Art Space in Singapore announced I Give You My 272 Days and Nights in a bilingual project brochure. The proposal used an iPhone and an iPad as materials, asking the artist to retain the information produced through everyday use, including cloud data. The devices were then to become an interactive installation that visitors could operate, with permission to download or delete information and communicate through the artist’s online identity. The proposal brought time, identity and privacy into the work; the archive preserves its terms and associated documentation.
In Red Envelope (2014), Liu used WeChat to divide one yuan equally among one hundred participants, each receiving one fen. The work unfolded through the act of receiving and responding to this tiny sum. In his commentary, Liao Liao interprets the exchange as transforming the social obligations and relationships associated with traditional red envelopes into sharing, interaction and play. This interpretation is preserved alongside records of the project’s system interfaces.
Begun in the second half of 2015, Social Media Circle draws on images and videos circulating through WeChat and develops across video and painting. The artist’s statement describes a single image multiplying into a video mosaic as speech accumulates into noise. Liao Liao’s commentary considers image circulation, shared identity and the numbing effects of viewing. The Daily Reflection livestream performance art festival and Standing in the Clouds online presentation, both listed under 2016 in the CV, continued his work within networked spaces.
2021–2024
Recent Performance and Arts Organizing
The CV entries for 2021 list the video and live performance project The 312th Day of the COVID-19 Pandemic in New York, alongside the independent art project AAC. In 2022, Liu developed Lewis’s Presidential Campaign Speech as a performance and video project and Trump Death Clock — Manhattan as an on-site performance. The CV also records arts funding from Creatives Rebuild New York (CRNY) that year. The available records document the continuation of his New York practice during this period.
In 2023, $0.25 Coin · Breath @ 1 unfolded as an everyday performance in Juniper Valley Park, while $0.25 Coin · Breath @ 2 is listed in the CV as a performance with daily updates on the streets of New York. That year, Liu also participated in Live Art Tour 8: Immersive at Grace Exhibition Space. These records bring everyday locations, sustained actions and live performance into the same period of his work.
In 2024, Liu was appointed Artistic Director of the U.S. Golf Art Foundation. His teaching from 1995, independent practice in Beijing from 2006 to 2017, and artmaking and nonprofit arts work in New York from 2017 form the biographical course traceable through the documents currently available. The archive will continue to develop the account of his subsequent practice through individual works, interviews and project records.