Chinning Liu — CalArts Post Grad Show Y25

Chinning Liu

(Art MFA 25)
IG: @chinningliu

Sac, 2025

Chinning Liu’s arresting, black and iridescent ceiling to floor sculpture twists like molting snake skin — or like braided hair — evoking the body’s continuous cycles of decay and regeneration. A SCOBY sac, plucked from the gloaming, sits at the center of the sculpture’s medallion. The sculpture transforms the gallery into a space where both catabolism and growth occur simultaneously, making visible metabolic processes usually hidden within our bodies. Liu stages an encounter between hologram fabric, polyethylene fiber, natural rubber latex, hair, dust, and living microbial culture. With a background in clinical psychology and study of biomaterials, Liu generates wrecked, organic forms that evoke the unconscious traces left behind by time. Memory accumulates in, and sloughs off the body. Borderlines are ambiguated between natural and artificial, human and inhuman.

PROXY CHIMERA ORACLE

CalArts 2025