Crystal Liu: Give Us Our Dream: Part One

Crystal Liu’s visual vocabulary has always been composed of certain child-like themes – birds, houses, trees, mountains, sugary cakes, clouds, flowers – illustrating simple narratives while expressing metaphors for complex emotional states.

In her newest body of work Liu has photographed cut flowers that she has frozen in blocks of ice. What began as a desire to destroy something – expecting the blossoms to wither and turn black – became instead a way of arresting the passage of time.

Because flowers have frequently acted as stand-ins for people in Liu’s work, it is easy to look at these photographs as portraits. But fractured and abstracted though these images are, they are also akin to traditional still-life. The mere act of capturing a moment in time – through still-life painting or photography – is an acknowledgment that life is fleeting. Yet in the lush colors of these delicate objects preserved in the prime of their beauty, there seems to reside a wistful fantasy of eternal youth.

Crystal Liu was born in Canada to Chinese immigrants. She received her MFA at the San Francisco Art Institute in 2005 and lives and works in San Francisco.