Crystal Liu: You’re Invited

Recent San Francisco Art Institute graduate Crystal Liu shows whimsical, slightly ominous drawings from two bodies of work. The first, “My House is Dead; it’s my birthday,” is a series of stylized cakes in various stages of transmutation. Portrayed at a point sometime beyond their purest state, the individual cakes are subject to entropic forces that cause them to sink into decay, or to rearrange their sugary atoms into something else entirely, such as trees, flowers, stars, or everyday objects.

In the second series, titled “My Butter Cream Clouds,” the cake frosting has floated off and turned into clouds. Here a narrative progression emerges and clouds, rain, and stars take on a life of their own. In Liu’s anthropomorphic, metamorphic world, everything is extraordinary and anything is possible.