An Te Liu

Trained both as an architect and art historian, An Te Liu is a Canadian installation artist working across a number of different media. Featuring an interview with multimedia artist Ken Lum, contributions from Kitty Scott, Curator of Creative Arts at the Art Gallery of Ontario, and critic and curator Andrew Berardini, this richly illustrated monograph provides the first comprehensive overview of the artist’s work in a series of expressive, personal and critical texts.

Liu’s work plays with scale and context to repurpose the appliances, devices and architecture most readily associated with the domestic, whether casting a vacant house as a monopoly piece or gathering an airborne constellation of hundreds of air purification units, dehumidifiers and ionizers. In Liu’s work, these objects are used to explore themes as diverse as the subprime mortgage crisis that brought about the 2008 financial crash and the modernist obsession with purity and hygiene.

An Te Liu reworks site and space, while drawing on his substantial knowledge of the history of cultural production, design, architecture and his research into contemporary trends in consumerism. This interdisciplinary approach triggers a recognisable aesthetic throughout the artist’s varied body of work.

Liu’s work has been exhibited internationally at venues including the Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam; the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art; Ursula Blickle Stiftung, Kraichtal; EVA International, Ireland; the Venice Biennale of Architecture; and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Liu’s works are included in the permanent collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; the Art Gallery of Ontario; and The Art Institute of Chicago.

Published in partnership with the Southern Alberta Art Gallery.