Zigsen Liu: Left and Yet to Come

Curatorial statement: Eli Welbourne

Imagery is not static. Images are propelled by the inertia of our attention. They operate both as still objects and as events animated by the mechanisms of presentation. We continually move through a corridor of images to reach our own thoughts again, a passage of noise and static from which form is derived.

Images shape how we make meaning of our collective experiences, becoming symbols through which we interpret, remember, and reconstruct the world around us. They are also freely subjected to reproduction, distortion, memes, decontextualization, censorship, and deconstruction. As the technologies through which we produce and encounter images continue to evolve, so too does the relationship between representation, form, and materiality. We are moving from a world mediated by images toward one increasingly modeled, decompiled, and regenerated through computational systems.

AI sits uneasily as a subject. Artists are uniquely tasked in this era with distilling its implications and rendering new symbols and dialogue. What happens to meaning-making when an image can be generated, recombined, and reproduced beyond its relationship to a singular material encounter? What can painting offer within this condition?

In Liu’s work we see these forces negotiated through the act and process of painting itself. Liu lets images take shape through the unstable synthesis of intention, gesture, and form. The paintings bear this impermanence in their very structure, collapsing between states of composure and vibrant abstraction. That impermanence is bound up with Liu’s own relationship to painting as a response to image generation, a negotiation that reaches down to the imprint of his gesture in each brushstroke. Each mark is a recorded signature of the image becoming something else.

There is a kinetic and playful kind of velocity that can be traced through each figure. The unique physics of a slinky come to mind - as forms gather, spring into fractured light, recompile, and find new relationships with one another. Recognition is never entirely lost, but neither is it allowed to settle. The paintings hold the viewer within this movement, between the impulse to identify what is seen and the realization that the image is still in the process of forming. The German word Sehnsucht feels especially useful here: a yearning that reaches as readily toward what has been left as toward what is yet to come.

In Star-Boned (2026), Through this Night (2026), and Creation (2026), we receive a cosmic transmission. Figures are broken by the dimensional rifts of the cosmos as they expand into the void. These paintings ask where the human stands within the arena of a vast material universe that is also a technological landscape. Ancient cosmic orders and evolving technological interfaces meet within a space where past and future, body and environment, and the familiar and the unknowable coexist. The cosmos becomes a field through which our sense of position, scale, and time is flattened into the eternal. The figures inhabit a universe where the act of locating oneself is inseparable from the instability of the instrumentation used to do so. The infinite is alien and unknowable.

In Halo (2026), the question of position extends to the orientation of the work itself. The image is not bound to a single, authoritative position: the painting can be turned upside down, bringing another image into view. The act of looking becomes an act of reorientation, revealing how meaning depends not only on what is represented but on the position from which it is encountered. The painting holds multiple possibilities within the same material object, and its legibility shifts with the viewer.

The portraits Dream (2026), With Light (2026), and With Shadow (2026) bring the question of recognition into intimate focus. The tension between representation and its construction becomes personal. The face remains recognizable, yet it expands and recedes between familiarity and uncertainty, an echo that threads through all of Liu’s work.

Together, these works form a system of relationships within the universe of Liu’s paintings, a constellation of characters and events that occur within a theater of nonlinear dissolve. Each viewer navigates states of instability differently, yet a set of shared questions emerges, motioning toward the ineffable and the existential. The paintings do not offer a definitive map of this condition. Instead, they invite us to move among shifting orientations, cosmic coordinates, and faces that hover in a luminescent, haunting, and fractured disorientation.

This uncertainty is a productive condition in image-making. At a moment when images can be endlessly reproduced and reality increasingly modeled through computational systems, Liu’s paintings insist on the significance of the material encounter. They do not resolve the distance between the world and our experience of it; they inhabit that distance. Artistry lies within a sacred occupancy, a type of permeable barrier of the in-between, a connective tissue between worlds. The desire to gesture upon the fabric of material reality undergoes a kind of alchemical transformation. New images, objects, and language take form and attempt to translate the utterances that swell from the muck of our subconscious. Somewhere along the corridor of images, form emerges from that ecstatic noise.