The Dream that Flocks South《睡去依依随雁断》
Lucy XC Liu Solo Exhibition at Acentric Space, Shanghai, China, Oct. 2021
I am performing inside my immersive sculpture during the exhibition.
I made near 100m2 of handmade paper from the Qing dynasty banned novel The Dream of the Red Chamber. I reference the line “The land is cleansed by snowfall” from this book, covering the floor with large sheets and suspending dreamy constructions from the ceiling. On the exhibition opening, I invited the audience to tread into the work, tearing and soiling it. In the sculpture, I did a Chinese Kunqu Opera performance of the love story The Peony Pavilion, which is an important reference in The Dream of the Red Chamber. The shattered dream of romance in our performance is metaphorical to the destruction of culture.
The young lady Du Liniang drifts into a dream in which she has an affair with Liu Mengmei, a young scholar who approached her with a willow branch in hand.
When Du Liniang wakes and realizes the love affair was all a dream, she is heartbroken, falls ill and dies eventually. The strength of her pursuit for love merits her return from the underworld. Her ghost wanders in the world of the living, to seek the young scholar of her dreams.
Performance Video & Virtual Tour
Lucy XC Liu as Lady Du Liniang, Jesse Jiaxin Wang as the Scholar Liu Mengmei (Select high res in settings for best effect)
Sculptural Details
Welcome to my studio! This is how I made paper for this immersive sculpture.
About the Artist
Lucy XC Liu
I am an interdisciplinary artist and writer creating works across the registers of the analytic, theatric and literary. My large-scale immersive sculptures and enactments(including spoken word poetry and Chinese Kunqu opera) are theatrical spaces that envelope viewers and elicit their responses to trigger societal truths; my photo, video, words, sculptural objects and painting create disorienting narratives of corporeal movement through mystic realms.
With a wide range of sensitive materials that denote fragility, deconstruction and renewal, I question if things falling apart are preludes of unity, and whether healing the ruptures on personal and societal levels is transiently possible. I reenact otherworldly scenes and embody Chinese and Western mythical figures whose audacity and grief have propelled them to transcend not only the constraints of society, but even life and death. I explore the multifaceted truths of societal trauma and the destruction of culture, giving voice to individual testimonies of hunger and desire which often corrode upon the versions of history that justify power.
I am dedicated to global humanities dialogues, self-identifying as a culture-mechanic that mends the ruptures between the past and the present, the East and the West. I had multiple solo and group exhibitions in the US, China, UK, Italy and Greece. I’m a recipient of the prestigious Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, and the Paris Photo Prize. Reviews of my work are in mainstream media and databases including the Smithsonian Institution, China Daily, and People’s Daily. I served as a guest juror for the 2025 Delaware Devision of the Arts Individual Artist Fellowships.
I love squirrels. Sending some warm squirrel thoughts to whoever reading this.