Looking for care givers in Manhattan Chinatown to participate in my project for my upcoming group show. Care givers: someone who performs care work, which is paid or unpaid labor of providing physical, emotional, and developmental support to others. Please DM me if you are interested.
Care work demands one to place others over themselves. Cleaning, as a form of care, is often self-effacing. Hair is often a subject of cleaning and care, and also an intimate material that leaves a trace. Through story-telling and trace leaving, this piece looks into the often overlooked care work that we all rely on.
The exhibition is curated by @dylanskim , presented by @protocinema , at ISS Storefront for Ideas.
@ccinstar is an artist whose work explores intimacy, reciprocity, and shared care across cultural and personal boundaries. Moving between Chinese and U.S. contexts, Liu creates participatory installations and performances that transform everyday encounters into spaces of connection. At Skowhegan, she crafted Can we share some time together?, a work using human hair spun into a broom to brush the audience while haircut conversations played, making tangible the tenderness of touch and trust. Other projects, like Are you from China? and Crystal Bubble Palace, playfully navigate identity, displacement, and fantasy through gestures of humor and empathy. Across works that span from cooking exchanges to collaborative photo projects, Liu reassigns agency and reveals the subtle dynamics of relationships, enacting Audre Lorde’s notion of the erotic as power to nurture collective care and possibility.
Sidian Liu has been recognized by the Rema Hort Mann Fund as a talented emerging artist, we look forward to seeing the next steps she takes in her career.
Read more about Sidian’s works and other recognized emerging artists via the link in our bio.
Video editing by @alexiserey
#emergingartist #contemporaryart #artistinterview #artcommunity #nextgenartists
Sidian Liu @ccinstar is an artist, translator, yarner, and nest builder based in New York City. Using ”housewife skills,“ she makes social relationships to facilitate trust and intimacy from a respectful distance, exploring pathways to further solidarity in our challenging times. Living in flux as a Chinese woman and an immigrant in the U.S., her works often take forms in images, performance, light-weight installations, and socially-engaged projects. In “照拂 reflect/brush,” Liu meditates on invisibilized caregiving alongside its societal and familial expectations to sustain the conditions for everyday life. She invites those who reside in Chinatown and self-identify as caregivers to participate. The artist defines caregiving broadly to encompass the performance of reproductive activities across domestic, communal, and professional contexts, all devoted to caring for others.
In her temporary salon, she offers participants free haircuts and the option to have their oral histories recorded. Following the haircutting sessions, Liu creates cleaning tools from the collected hair and leads a series of public brooming performances alongside the playback of the participants’ stories.
Last night I did a lecture performance in @mekkoh ‘s work for the upcoming Greater New York show @momaps1 after @liebeliebe ‘s amazing sound performance. My lecture performance is titled “精神污染：从荷东的士高到社会摇/Spiritual Pollution: from Hollywood East Disco to Society Shake.” It covers the history of disco in China: how it got in, got popular underground, how the youth got arrested, some died dancing it, how it got legitimized and encouraged, and how it evolved into Plaza Dance nowadays, and its incarnation to 社会摇society shake, 科目三kemusan, and then 高雅人士Elegant People. The lecture ended with me teaching everyone society shake, and I love the notes from this lecture. 🪩 🪩
Last Friday I taught a zine making workshop to a group of cancer patients at Mt Sinai via their @mshscancersupportiveservices Cancer Supportive Services program. We made some one-sheet 8 page zines and spent some time collaging. Most participants treated the zine as a place to collect what they like. It was very wholesome. Thank you Diego Ortiz Quintero and Alison Snow for inviting me, and to Emma (Mi) Zhou for facilitating.
A new piece of mine”百虎图 A Hundred Tigers (Work in Progress)” is on view at group show “What Images” curated by Lindsey Arturo @lnzmusic_glowcats and Kaitlyn Paston @kp_zzzzzz at The College of New Jersey Art Gallery, on view through April 5, 2026.
I was planning to make a video, but the production got intensely postponed by my parents’ Chinese new year visit. So I am showing the ingredients of this video: some woodblock prints I made following (to my best) the traditional New year’s print making technique in my hometown, Foshan, China. The prints are based on drawings of a class of 13-year-olds in Foshan, whom I commissioned to draw “tiger or tiger chairs.” The 10 minute audio accompanying these prints explains more on tiger 🐅’s worshipped, persecuted, extinct images in contemporary China, and how they are linked to the collective lack of historical images.
My work is right next to @layanattari_ ‘s video featuring a cat 🐈 catching mirror reflection and @amndtx ‘s video talking about birds 🦜 in Brazil. 💗💗💗
The exhibition also features great works by dear @lnzmusic_glowcats@kp_zzzzzz@helenhelenwilson@adiblausteinrejto and some more talented artists.
I made this site-specific piece for a recent group show.
Company Map
2026
Site specific installation
Laser-cut double sided adhesive, text piece based on School of Visual Art’s Physical Security Policies
Company Map is a series of laser-cut text arrows installed throughout the exhibition Séance of the Underground, at the MA Curatorial Practice Program on the 10th floor of School of Visual Arts, 132 West 21st Street, New York MY. Curated by Samuel Moussan Kim, who is a student at MA Curatorial Practice, the exhibition was on view from February 12 to March 8, 2026.
The text draws from SVA’s Physical Security Policy, which begins: “School of Visual Art is hereinafter referred to as ‘the company.’” By adopting this corporate language, the work reveals the exhibition space as a regulated zone governed by approval, “trust,” and access control.
Cut from transparent double-sided adhesive and applied directly to the floor, the arrows initially appear almost invisible. Viewers may first encounter them not visually but physically through the stickiness. The language becomes clearer through collective contact, accumulating dust and debris, and eventually degrades and deforms.
Forming a map within an exhibition that designates a clear moving path, the arrows questions the ambiguity of the publicness and inclusiveness of the exhibition, and the terms of entry and compliance that struct the visit.
Thinking of the hair broom I made in Skowhegan in 2025 summer.
I have had this idea for a while but finally had the chance to try it out at Skowhegan. I offered free haircuts to my cohort in exchange of a recorded conversation. The collected hair was spun into long strands before being assembled into a broom. At the activation performance, you are invited to step into a cleaning zone where we brush this broom on each other. Stands of hair may remain on your clothes and skin, carrying residue if someone else’s DNA, time, memory. Selected recordings from the haircuts accompanied the activation, echoing stories about hair and everything the hair remembers.
I named it “Can we share some time together?”
It was a great year. Many actions and movements, many new friends who showed me how to love, some losses too, saw shooting stars with bare eyes, saw whales for the first time, lots of moments of being moved. Went back home for the first time in 4 years and reconnected with the great pain that shaped me. Great serotonin intake too.
Are you from China? (2025) was partially screened last week at Crafting the Fix, curated by @dylanskim and presented by @protocinema and @far___near . It was my first time showing this piece in a group setting and I am glad to hear the laughters it triggered. Photos here (excluding the film still in the last pic) credit @suniko.b
Are you from China? was a performance (28 minute 11 seconds) made during my time in Maine this summer. I crashed the opening reception of an art exhibition, titled Made in China, organized by the China Historical Society, in a Maine town called China. I greeted the attendees and asked them: are you from China? If they say yes, I shook their hands and tried to exchange some news from China. This performance was videotaped by dear @inbarhagai
Had a lovely time returning to Fort Collins for my show. It was wholesome to see some of the kitchen owners/project participants again, and to meet some new faces at my artist talk. Thank you @focolincolnctr team Liz, Kristen, and Ellen (in pic 8) for hosting me. And thank you @hamidahg@thec4fap for bringing my project to Fort Collins.
My solo show The Conch Girl Project in Fort Collins is on view at @focolincolnctr The Lincoln Center, Fort Collins, Colorado from Oct 24 to Dec 16, 2025.
Last September, with the support of the Denis Roussel Fellowship organized by @thec4fap the Center for Fine Art Photography, I travelled to Fort Collins to conduct @theconchgirlproject and cooked in 6 local kitchens. And I feel very lucky to be able to show, to exhibit what I made in Fort Collins, and have the image printed big. Let our realities and kindness be examined.
The Conch Girl’s Cookbook Issue 2 (Fort Collins edition) is available at the gallery. Free to take. Generously supported by The Lincoln Center.
