wayne liu

BIOGRAPHY

I was born in Taipei, Taiwan, like my parents, but unlike my grandparents, who fled from Sichuan, China after the Second World War. At five, I moved with my parents to Dallas and then to New Jersey, where I learned to be American. When I was eleven, we moved back to Taiwan, where I learned to be Taiwanese, with much confusion involved. The imaginary of China was in Taiwan, through the politics of my grandparents' generation. I resisted forming a Taiwanese identity, since in my mind I was still living in the suburbs outside New York. 

My connection to the intergenerational relations and historical forces between China, Taiwan and the US informs my practice, as I navigate between the layers of time (through photography), memory (through mining of photographs in the archive) and dust (as gathered on the photographic prints and on hard drives over time). My work performs and documents an unnamable desire originating from the displacement of cultural identities. I operate on the creative process of finding new meanings for the ostensibly obsolete past. I often collaborate with artists, mixing photographs, video and installation with sounds and text to investigate the other life forms that images can become.