My current works engage the visual language of abstraction and quasi-form as a way of exploring the hybrid aesthetics and culture sensibility informed by my bicultural and multidisciplinary background. I grew up in China and was trained as an electrical engineer before moving to the United States in pursuit of a creative career. This initially led me to become a digital artist working in visual effects. My compositions, shapes and marks are informed by a mixed array of sources. This ranges from eastern traditions and antiquities like ancient Chinese landscape painting, Chinese textile design and scholar rocks, to digital means in image production like layering and procedural pattern generation using mathematical noises. With mediums like soft and oil pastel, I push for an intense and kaleidoscopic color scheme rooted in western modern color theory which uses the interaction of color to construct relationships that go beyond depicting observation. I’m interested in seeing these heterogeneous sources merge and collapse into each other. In my works, I take the process of synthesizing these sources as a way of embedding meaning into marks, shapes, and colors, to push them beyond just the formal concerns. Through a prolonged process of mark making, erasing and layering, I end up with quasi-landscape imagery that often looks fragmented and dissonant. As an immigrant, a queer person and someone trying to navigate through the ever-changing contemporary experience. I often feel a sense of uncertainty and fragility in my existence and environment, and the inability to secure a sense of belonging. This language of abstraction that sits in the liminal space allows me to go on a quest in defining, losing, and redefining that feels liberal, spiritual and meditative, without the need of giving or arriving at a closed-end answer that feels too easy and binary.

Bio:

Siran Liu (b. 1989, Beijing, CN) is a visual artist working in the Bronx and upstate New York. His practice spans drawing, printmaking and sculpture. Siran was trained as an electrical engineer back in China. He then moved to the United States to pursue a Masters degree in digital visualization. This propelled him into the entertainment industry, working at leading animation studios such as Laika and Blue Sky. In recent years, Siran has shifted his focus to fine art and completed the post baccalaureate program in studio art at Brandeis University in 2023. Drawing from his bicultural and multidisciplinary background, Siran pulls and mixes divergent influences in his works including Chinese antiquities; western modern color theory; and digital means in image production. Working in a lineage of landscape painting tradition from China, Siran uses a quasi-form that sits in between landscape and abstraction to contextualize an experience of living through complex cultural sensibilities that deals with the duality/hybridity between east and west, analog and digital, antiquity and novelty.  

downloadable CV here

siran.here at gmail.com

Selected Group Exhibitions:

2023 Cat’s Cradle - Brandeis University studio art post baccalaureate exhibition, Dreitzer gallery, Waltham, MA

2020  Craft in Contemporary Art, Juried by Samantha De Tillio, Site:Brooklyn Gallery, Brooklyn, NY

2019  Monotype & Printmaking Exhibition, Salmagundi Club, New York, NY

2018  Garment District Art Festival, Artosino Gallery, New York, NY

2018  A Design Award & Competition Exhibition, Como, Italy

2016  Paper Works, Upstream Gallery, Hudson, NY.

2016  Art of Post, Agory Gallery, New York, NY.

2016  86th Annual Juried Open Show, National Art Leauge, Queens, NY.

Education:

2023  Post Baccalaureate, Studio Arts, Brandeis University, USA

2020  MS, Visualization, Texas A&M University, USA

2019   B.Eng, Communication Engineering, Tianjin University, China

Honors & Recognitions:

2019 Certificate of Excellence Award, Salmagundi Club's 2019 Monotype & Printmaking Exhibition

  Merit Award, iJungle Illustration Awards 2019 

2018 Bronz Awards at A Design Award & Competition

2015 Speaker at SIGGRAPH Studio Talk on Artistic Rendering, Los Angeles, California

2013 Pixar Aggie Scholarship and Aggie Alumni at ILM/Lucas Film Award 

Dreamworks Animation Scholarship 

3D Artist CG Student Awards - US Student Interships Winner 

SIGGRAPH Computer Animation Festival Best Student Project Runners-Up (Group Project “Sleddin“) 

Publication:

2015 First Author “Chinese Ink and brush painting with reflections“ - ACM SIGGRAPH 2015 Posters 

Second Author “Art directed rendering & shading“- ACM SIGGRAPH 2015 Posters