Shiyuan Liu

I was born in the era of globalisation brought about by the rapid development of information technology in 1999 and grew up in China. I've loved creating stories and telling them to others since I was a schoolboy. As I was exposed to more diverse media and art forms while growing up and learning, my way of telling stories gradually transformed from dictation to image, sound, performance, VR and other cross-media methods.

Contextualising these and my current practice/research interests, I identify myself as an artist working in interactive and mixed reality art, creating intimate and complex combinations of physical and virtual elements, exploring the contemporary self and its synthetic flesh. During graduate study at RCA currently, I have an ongoing fascination with all things emotional, embodied, felt, sensed. Over the last five years, this has included the visceral, the physical, the relational, the performative and the participatory. I am an digital artist/ storyteller within various art forms: Immersive experiences, VR, XR, participatory performance and interactive art.

With a very practice-based background, I create intimate and complex compositions of physical and virtual elements, exploring the contemporary self and its synthetic flesh. While using the virtual as an artistic medium and form of expression, I attempt to embrace digital artefacts and imperfections, creating virtual, perceivable self-representations that, despite their digital nature, can still be perceived and felt.

Beginning with this, within this context of the identification with my native culture and the critical thinking I have cultivated through years of systematic study in the West, I will address on the complex relationships between virtual/immersive media and the embodied/spiritual experience. 

I received the double degree of BA on 3D Animation from both Tianjin University of Technology, China and Université du Québec (University of Quebec), Canada.