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“Black Square,” Oil on linen, 20” x 24”, 2018 “Nice to meet you,” Oil on canvas, 25 x 35 cm, 2016

What is startling is that these are the efforts of a young artist. the artist gives the viewer more verbal clues as to what is going
Only this year did Liu receive his first solo exhibit anywhere, in on. He has titles for most of this series of canvases.
a Tribeca gallery, auspiciously enough. It certainly seems that
a more mature artistic talent is being brought to bear. Then In About to Explode #2, a cherry bomb type firecracker is in-
again, it is often that way with the good ones, who are fewer side and on the bottom of a glass pickle jar. Or is it a cherry
and farther between than one might imagine in a society that bomb? What first appears to be a fuse continues upwards, its
accepts the notion that excellence is decided by yelping and length piercing the jar top and extending until it connects with
twittering on social media. Pure visual art never has been for a red cube that floats in the air, beside a floating bronze colored
the masses. Excellence reveals itself as extraordinary, always. orthotope – rectangular cuboid – that floats above a white cube.
All this plays out in front of another, almost neutral colored
If Liu’s use of destabilization and juxtaposition are jazzy in his cuboid that stands monolithically on the same plane as the jar.
examination of what it is to not make a portrait, the play of
these energies in some of his earlier works is positively sym- The jar itself is a study of how light reflects off glass while pass-
phonic. Each painting is a conversation within itself, between ing through it - a dichotomy that is central to the nature of clear
the depicted and the implied, and the language can be secre- glass jars and bottles. Throughout this series, every glass bottle
tive. Most include glass bottles. and jar in each painting is unique within the series. No two
containers are alike.
These glass bottle paintings seem to this viewer to be evidence
of a devious humor doing serious work. At first glance, they ap- In Falling Down, things appear to be rising, lifting themselves
pear to be related to still life composition, and maybe they are, up, exerting energy to defeat gravity. The glass bottle here seems
but in a way that deconstructs the very idea of a still life. Here stabilized in mid-air, suspended in place and space by a red

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