Dan Liu
Art and Science MA
Central Saint Martins UAL
Specialisms: Fine Art / Installation/Sculpture / Digital Arts
Location: London, United Kingdom
Dan Liu
First Name: Dan
Last Name: Liu
Specialisms: Fine Art / Installation/Sculpture / Digital Arts
Sectors:
My Location: London, United Kingdom
University / College: Central Saint Martins UAL
Course / Program Title: Art and Science MA
About
I'm a Canadian artist based in London, working between steel, drawing and code.
I began a painting apprenticeship in Beijing as a child and trained in fine art at The Fine Arts School Affiliated to the China Central Academy of Fine Arts. In Toronto, I studied digital media art at Seneca College and spent some twenty years in graphic design and print production before returning to my own practice — a BFA in Drawing & Painting at OCAD University and, this year, the MA in Art & Science at Central Saint Martins, UAL, both with distinction.
My work circles one question: where the living stops and the fabricated begins. The Human-Machine series approaches it through drawing, using metallic colour as an industrial stand-in for flesh; Human-Machine: Möbius, my graduation work, moves it into three dimensions—a hand-welded steel loop drawn over its whole surface in one continuous direction, on a form with no inside or outside to separate.
I move between materials rather than specializing in one: laser-engraved plywood reliefs, illuminated acrylic, and immersive pieces built in Unity, including In Between Cubes, a tesseract you can walk through. What holds them together is an interest in geometry that behaves in ways intuition doesn't predict.
www.DanGraphics.ca
In recent years my practice has run through code, lasers and VR. Human-Machine: Möbius takes the opposite path: it is made entirely by hand. I welded steel sheets into a continuous, single-sided loop — 1.7 × 1.1 × 0.7 m, roughly the volume of a person — then drew across it in one unbroken direction, following the form as a kind of pilgrimage: creatures, plants and machinery massing around a human-shaped void. A Möbius loop has no inside or outside; the drawing closes on itself because the surface leaves it nowhere else to go. It evolves from my Human-Machine drawings: nature, humanity and their machinery entangled, on a surface caught between two and three dimensions.
Competitions
