Past, Past Exhibitions>Past NGC@MOCCA Exhibitions
An Te Liu: Solid States

October 3 – December 6 Toronto Sculpture Garden 115 King Street East 7am – 7pm daily

Project Co-Produced by: The Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art and The City of Toronto Presented as part of Scotiabank Nuit Blanche, Toronto, 2015 The Toronto Sculpture Garden sets the scene for a new installation by An Te Liu, an internationally exhibited Toronto-based artist. Solid States(2015) continues Liu’s practice of creating hybrid sculptural objects evocative of modernist and ethnographic traditions in art and the detritus of consumerism. Liu’s practice combines these elements, finding the primordial form lurking within domestic artifacts, household electronics and their packaging, the recto/verso as it were of contemporary manufacturing processes.

Through bronze casting, these works transform to embody the artist’s perception of a culture in transition. The cultural tendency Liu summons is one that moves between resource extraction to the technological juggernaut, from nation states to the transglobal, from ethnic tradition and identity to polyglot amalgam.

At its root, modernism found vitality by embracing non-Western traditions in art and the most relevant antecedents of Liu’s practice are the sculptors’ Brancusi, Hepworth and Noguchi. Liu could be said to, in particular, update Brancusi’s practice of combining folk tradition with modern art idiom. More pertinent is the idea that Liu makes artworks within this frame of reference to help heighten awareness about unique aspects of our own historical moment.

Click here to download a pdf of a map of the exhibition along with An Te’s artist statement.