Wen Liu is a visual artist born in Shanghai, China, and based in Brooklyn, New York. Working across sculpture, installation, and mixed media, her practice examines migration, memory, and the evolving structures through which individuals construct belonging. Through processes of mold making and casting, Liu investigates the tension between permanence and impermanence, exploring how absence, loss, and healing become embedded within material form.

Central to her practice is an analogy between mold making and molting in nature, the shedding of skin through which animals and insects grow and endure. Liu understands mold making as a parallel act: a process in which an original form is preserved only through rupture. The resulting cast retains the body’s imprint, allowing memory and transformation to coexist within the same structure.

Her ongoing series Inarticulate Trace emerged following the passing of her father and from her own difficulty articulating grief across languages. Turning to Chinese herbal medicine as part of her healing process made her attentive to how care relies on verbal descriptions of sensation and imbalance. By embedding prescribed herbal medicines within sculptural forms, Liu preserves traces of treatment as material residues, transforming private prescriptions into structures that hold grief, care, and embodied memory.

Liu is a 2026 AIM Fellow at the Bronx Museum of the Arts, 2025 MacDowell Fellow and 2022 grantee of the Roswell Artist-in-Residence Foundation. She has received Individual Artist Program grants from the City of Chicago’s Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events (2018, 2019, 2020) and the Illinois Arts Council Artist Fellowship (2020). Her work has been exhibited at institutions including The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum (CT), the Chicago Cultural Center (IL), Roswell Museum (NM), Lubeznik Center for the Arts (IN), and the National Centre for the Performing Arts in Beijing.

Wen Liu is a visual artist born in Shanghai, China, and based in Brooklyn, New York. Working across sculpture, installation, and mixed media, her practice examines migration, memory, and the evolving structures through which individuals construct belonging. Through processes of mold making and casting, Liu investigates the tension between permanence and impermanence, exploring how absence, loss, and healing become embedded within material form.

Central to her practice is an analogy between mold making and molting in nature, the shedding of skin through which animals and insects grow and endure. Liu understands mold making as a parallel act: a process in which an original form is preserved only through rupture. The resulting cast retains the body’s imprint, allowing memory and transformation to coexist within the same structure.

Her ongoing series Inarticulate Trace emerged following the passing of her father and from her own difficulty articulating grief across languages. Turning to Chinese herbal medicine as part of her healing process made her attentive to how care relies on verbal descriptions of sensation and imbalance. By embedding prescribed herbal medicines within sculptural forms, Liu preserves traces of treatment as material residues, transforming private prescriptions into structures that hold grief, care, and embodied memory.

Liu is a 2026 AIM Fellow at the Bronx Museum of the Arts, 2025 MacDowell Fellow and 2022 grantee of the Roswell Artist-in-Residence Foundation. She has received Individual Artist Program grants from the City of Chicago’s Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events (2018, 2019, 2020) and the Illinois Arts Council Artist Fellowship (2020). Her work has been exhibited at institutions including The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum (CT), the Chicago Cultural Center (IL), Roswell Museum (NM), Lubeznik Center for the Arts (IN), and the National Centre for the Performing Arts in Beijing.