Anti Liu

Taiwanese, Long Island-based sculptor Anti Liu crafts enigmatic, darkly funny monuments to crisscrossing personal and public histories. Rarely painted or decorated, his bronze, ceramic, clay and terracotta figures and architectures foreground their raw materiality. Melding modern history, art history, American pop culture and imagery of terrorism and war, he demonstrates a Kafkaesque sensibility for the tragic, slumped forms of modernity’s overburdened subjects and its absurd buildings. Liu’s ironic, uneasy figures alternate between violence, humor, irony and gloom.

The very materiality of his sculptures gives them a delicacy that tempers the harshness of his subjects. Whether uncomfortable bodies, everyday objects, odd and unsettling characters or hard-edged buildings, Liu’s work gains in complexity by drawing attention to its fragile and malleable materials. Like the passages in Taiwanese history, American politics and global popular culture it comments on, Liu’s art is shaped by its audience. Alternately troubling, funny, quizzical, satirical and formally intriguing, his meticulous, charming objects point viewers in certain directions, but let our minds wander.