Oil paint with bamboo brush on canvas, 4.5' x 5'.
Lan Liu is a conceptual artist and painter, whose current work focuses on the ‘crown’ of human subjects as forms of abstract portraiture. Liu posits that "hair is a stamp of time for humans". By looking at the top of someone’s head and hair patterns, which is an intimate, vulnerable and revealing area of the human body, one is able to sense the ‘shape’ of the time. With Chinese calligraphy brush and oil paint, Liu renders painstaking detail with precise lines to create these abstract portraits of the human subject and experience. Lan Liu's massive oil on canvas paintings rendered with the traditional Chinese bamboo brush, portray and transfix a momentary viewpoint of the subject's crown, reminding the viewer of the impending changes to one's physicality over time and marking its absence in advance.
Lan Liu is a pupil of the renown Chinese artists Chen Danqing and Wang Jian and has earned her MFA from California State University, San Jose. She currently resides and works in the SF Bay Area. Liu was born in Handan, China, the former capital city during the Zhao Dynasty. The city is known for its long history of Chinese dynastic art forms such as traditional Chinese calligraphy and poetry which primarily focuses on the discourse of line. Line is an essential element in the history of Chinese visual culture and literary arts. With lines being the primary formal language in Liu’s works, she simultaneously employs the ideological and philosophical connotations of line within her work.