Untitled Art Miami Beach

Shaped by a life lived across places, Liu Tianlian always goes beyond what’s in front of her. Her works are informed by the overlapping roles she inhabits, as an artist, a mother, a partner, and a new immigrant adjusting to life in the United States. Across her works runs a quiet undercurrent of distance, the limbo phase where she is physically present here while her mind drifts elsewhere.

These moments surface not in dramatic scenes but in the pauses of the mundane aspects of life, while soothing a child, going on a subway ride, or waiting on the drying cycle at the laundromat, etc. Liu’s imagined realm unfolds in these small intervals, pushing back against the subtle erosion of the self that the daily routines can impose. Through this gentle friction between the imagined and the everyday, Liu reclaims her own agency.

Brain Baby series draw on two classic thought experiments, the Western philosophical puzzle “Brain in a Vat” and the Chinese parable of Zhuangzi’s butterfly dream. Though emerging from different traditions, both pose the same fundamental question: How do we know the reality we inhabit is real?

Liu Tianlian sometimes withdraws from her surroundings. “I’m just simply living in a new city after all,” she recalls, “yet it feels as if I’ve stepped out of the world I used to know.” The empirical knowledge that guided Liu for years does not apply to her new life. Liu has to learn a new language, and to navigate a social landscape structured by unfamiliar norms.

Liu Tianlian named this work after the biblical story Exodus. At the center of the piece, her two sons squeezed together in a bathtub, yet alongside the domestic scene appear two iconic episodes from the biblical Book of Exodus: the Frog Plagues and Moses splitting the Red Sea.

Using the everyday as an anchor, Liu suspends the scene between the ordinary and the sacred. The water in the tub becomes a point of convergence, recalling, for her, the amniotic fluid of pregnancy, a space with “clear boundaries and no escape,” while also echoing the sea Moses crossed to bound to a new land. Within these overlapping associations lie her self reflections on parenthood, the decision to uproot, and the tension between containment and passage, constraint and breakthrough. These oppositions surface not through grand declarations, but through the small, accumulated details of daily life.