Wen Liu (b. 1985) 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 mold making and casting, Liu explores the tension between permanence and impermanence, investigating 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, one 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 during her healing process made her increasingly attentive to how care depends upon 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.
Wen Liu is a 2026 AIM Fellow at the Bronx Museum of the Arts and has received fellowships from Yaddo and the Bogliasco Foundation (2026), MacDowell (2025), and the Roswell Artist-in-Residence Foundation (2022). She has also received Individual Artist Program grants from the City of Chicago’s Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events (2018, 2019, 2020), as well as an 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.