Xia Liu

Xia Liu is a projection artist whose work examines how light changes a space, a surface, and the viewer’s sense of time. Moving between performance, installation, projected image, and sculptural intervention, Liu treats light not simply as a tool for illumination but as a material that can reorganize perception.

Liu’s interest in projection began in the small village where they were raised by their grandparents. One recurring memory is of summer evenings at the village entrance, when a white screen was raised and the community gathered to watch films outdoors. Liu remembers lying across their grandmother’s lap as images moved across the screen after dark. The experience of projected light, collective viewing, and the physical presence of the screen became an early source for the work.

They completed an MFA in the United States and are currently pursuing a practice-based PhD in Creative Arts in Australia. Their research, Sculpting Perception: The Poetics of Light and Artificial Darkness in Projection Art, gives a theoretical framework to concerns that first emerged through childhood experience: perception, technology, light, darkness, memory, and the physical conditions of viewing.

Liu began with performance and body-based work, using their own body to measure and occupy time and space. From there, the practice shifted toward projection. They became interested in how projected light behaves differently on a flat surface, on a three-dimensional object, and as it moves through a room. These experiments have led to an approach in which light can alter the viewer’s relationship to scale, depth, movement, and duration.

The work draws from artists who use light as a central element. James Turrell has been important for his treatment of light as an immersive environment; Sarah Sze for her engagement with scale, accumulation, and unstable constructed realities; and Lachlan Turczan for his attention to water, light, and sustained observation. Liu’s own work shares their interest in how a simple phenomenon can become spatially and emotionally complex through careful framing.

Projection, childhood, memory, time, and space are recurring concerns. Liu does not treat them as separate themes. The memory of village film screenings, for example, is connected to a larger investigation of how light can make a past experience active within the present. A projection onto a wall, floor, or object can turn a familiar surface into a site where different times and associations overlap.

Liu’s process is based on observation and repeated testing. They move through daily life asking how an object or environment behaves with light, time, and space, then pursue that question through physical experimentation. A projection may be tested in many configurations before one becomes viable. Even then, the selected version may be discarded if the work needs to move in a different direction.

This process is slow, practical, and body-based. The artist thinks through making rather than treating experimentation as a preliminary stage to be completed quickly. Duration is often part of the work’s structure.

Flat Sand is Boundless brings these concerns together. Inspired by Liu’s grandmother’s vegetable garden, the work features a robotic vacuum completing a ten-hour performance in a room. As the vacuum repeatedly traces the floor, its movement leaves visible marks that accumulate over time. The work considers land, care, repetition, and generational change through an ordinary machine and a sustained action.

The project emerged from a specific question: how can the same ground hold change without losing continuity? The garden had been cultivated across years, seasons, and family generations. In Flat Sand is Boundless, the vacuum’s repeated movement becomes a way to consider both persistence and alteration. The floor is marked again and again, but remains the same surface.

The work also clarified Liu’s commitment to slowness. Rather than reducing time to an idea, the ten-hour duration requires the work to unfold through time. The audience is asked to confront repetition as an active process, not a passive background.

Liu’s advice to emerging artists is to return to the experiences that formed them rather than beginning with trends or external expectations. For Liu, the most durable material comes from precise memory, lived place, and sustained attention. Their practice continues to explore the sculptural possibilities of projected light as a means of shaping space while remaining connected to questions of continuity, memory, and change.