Yuqing Liu
About
Liu Yuqing is a graphic designer and visual communication researcher. She uses illustration, photography, and digital imagery as means of visual communication, constantly exploring how to expand her practice in games and installations.Her research primarily stems from diverse perspectives on self-identity.
She obtained BA in Visual Communication Design from the Academy of Arts & Design at Tsinghua University. And she will complete her MA in Visual Communication at Royal College of Art in Auguest 2023.
Statement
Yuqing's practice primarily focuses on immigrant identity, exploration of Chinese cultural symbols, and narrative forms.
Leaving their familiar environment, immigrants become "others" in a foreign society. Various factors prompt them to reexamine their cultural identity, adjust, and reshape their sense of self-identity. How to accept oneself in a gentle way and communicate with the outside world has been a constant exploration in her practice.
Yuqing explores how Chinese immigrants observe the outside world within Western culture and the impact of Chinese cultural symbols in an overseas context through various forms such as photography, publications, collage activities, and food-themed electronic games. This discussion mainly revolves around Chinatown and the culinary culture derived from it.
Simultaneously, she investigates the different influences and feedback that individuals and communities can experience when audiences engage in narrative storytelling in various participatory ways. By shifting the audience from spectators to participants, she explores whether different groups can foster mutual understanding through this gentle approach and the emotions generated by their own creative contributions.
Memory Collage Recipe
Memory Collage Recipe
"Memory Collage Recipe" is an interactive web-based art project aimed at exploring the feelings of loneliness and identity that overseas immigrants face in foreign lands. Overseas immigrants alleviate their sense of loneliness by consuming and preparing dishes from their homeland, which serves as an easily accessible form of self-comfort. Additionally, sharing and discussing food becomes a means for establishing emotional connections and resonance within unfamiliar cultural environments. Through sharing personal emotions and stories associated with food, individuals deepen their communication and mutual understanding. Based on this premise, the artist endeavors to facilitate food-based communication and multicultural understanding in the digital realm, while delving into the profound connection between food, memories, family, and cultural traditions.
Participants engage in the project by selecting ingredients, seasonings, tools, and other materials on the webpage to generate visualized recipes, which they then name. These recipes are preserved on the webpage for others to view. The visual representation of ingredients in the project intertwines with visual symbols representing the artist's childhood memories and hometown culture, forming a close association. This design aims to guide viewers in interpreting food. By participating in recipe creation and exploring others' creative presentations, viewers share emotional connections with food and contemplate their personal and cultural identities. The abstracted recipes, created through a visual language rooted in cultural symbols, become shareable visual puzzles, fostering an unconscious understanding of each other's cultures.
The project seamlessly integrates the artist, audience, and participants, collectively exploring the intricate relationship between food, personal experiences, emotional encounters, and cultural identity.
Medium: interactive web
walk through chinatown
subconscious
Exploring the subconscious through photography. Analyzing the created images is akin to ruminating on one's own creations.
Within the works of Walking Through Chinatown, the perspective reflected through glass windows overlaps the internal and external spaces. There are also more complex spaces generated by multiple layers of glass. You cannot determine whether you are in an interior or exterior space. Everything is a complex and chaotic juxtaposition, much like the multiple cultural identities carried by diaspora. This is the daily life of cultural borderlanders. You belong to your homeland, and you also belong to the new world."
Medium: photograph, sulfur paper printing
why am I always so hungry?
Medium: zine