Xinyu Liu

Artist Statement

Many times I find myself attracted to strangers, though we may never speak. To me, it feels like falling in love with an NPC character in the virtual world, a love story that wouldn’t bloom.The city we live in nowadays is like a giant multi-faceted crystal, in which layers of glass mirrors dissociate us from our surroundings. Through those self-reflective windows and LCD screens, we end up with projections of ourselves - our haggard faces and meager loneliness.

Meanwhile, in the giant crystal that we dwell on, memories are constantly condensing like molecules -time takes them away again and transforms them into different forms. Our daily forgetfulness reorganizes the broken links of memories, replacing one order with another, forming a complicated labyrinth. What if we start from two edges of this crystal, in contours and compromises, will our eyes meet again? It might almost be a love story.

I consider my project Almost a Love Story as a poetic archeological journey of personal memories during the Covid era of China. In this project, I created a nonspecific psychological landscape where the decoration of modern life becomes a complicated objective process and people constantly find themselves in a vacuum of emotions. Meanwhile, such “abstract inventory of spaces” also refers to memory degradation, personal losses and political depression being unspoken.

Xinyu Liu | Eugene, OR

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