Siran Liu
painting MFA
Rhode Island School of Design
Graduates: 2026
Specialisms: Fine Art / Painting / Drawing
My location: New York, United States
Siran Liu
First Name: Siran
Last Name: Liu
University / College: Rhode Island School of Design
Course / Program: painting MFA
Graduates: 2026
Specialisms: Fine Art / Painting / Drawing
My Location: New York, United States
Website: Click To See Website
About
Siran Liu (b. Beijing, China) is an artist based in New York. He holds an MFA in Painting from the Rhode Island School of Design, an MS in Visualization from Texas A&M University, and completed a post-baccalaureate program in Studio Art at Brandeis University. Before transitioning into fine art, he trained and worked across engineering, graphic design, and visual effects. His personal and professional work has been featured in contexts including the A’ Design Award & Competition, ACM SIGGRAPH, the iJungle Illustration Awards. Siran’s recent exhibitions include Gelman Gallery at the RISD Museum, Sol Koffler Gallery, East Manning Projects, the Rhode Island Convention Center in Providence, RI, and Uffner & Liu in New York City.
What does it mean to dream? In Zhuangzi’s butterfly dream, he dreams he is a butterfly. Upon waking, he asks: Am I a man who dreamt of being a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming that I am a man? In this story, dream becomes a state that destabilizes certainty. It opens a liminal zone where transformation happens; where ambiguity and doubt are allowed to exist. The moment of transition becomes untraceable, and distinction itself begins to dissolve. For me, painting occupies a similar space of suspension, where forms move between a thing, a happening, and a feeling. My work draws from patterns and symbols, written language systems, poetic phrases, and everyday objects. Through drawing and sketching, I turn these sources into abstract shapes, which I treat as a visual lexicon. In painting, they are reactivated through color, texture, and mark-making, transforming into hard-edge shapes, painterly marks, and calligraphic strokes that shift between object, event, and atmosphere. I am interested in how expression takes shape through the interaction of these visual elements: how they resonate with, emerge from, interrupt, and transform one another. If the painting is a place where forms dream, I let them transform into something unnamable: something that feels familiar, yet not fully identifiable. In this space, seeing is never fixed; it can hover between recognition, memory, and imagination.
Competitions
