Location: Brooklyn, NY, USA
Medium: Sculpture and Performance
Contact: admin@fuguegallery.com
Jayden Liu (b. Taichung, Taiwan) is a Brooklyn-based artist whose practice focuses on how human behavior and consciousness operate within a vast world machine. He understands the rules of the world as having already been inscribed by history, politics, and culture, while individuals act within preconfigured structures, executing what is called freedom only within permitted limits, thereby allowing the world machine to continue functioning.
Liu frequently casts everyday objects into unfamiliar forms, tightening or loosening the direct relationship between an object and its original use, historical narrative, and emotional memory. The works invite viewers to encounter these objects outside of functional logic, revealing the complexity and multiplicity embedded within a single form.
With a background in theater, Liu has developed a sustained interest in how actions are choreographed and how roles are generated within systems. Integrating performance practices from contemporary art with theatrical structures, his work employs sound, scenography, and bodily presence to explore how behavior is reshaped, transformed, or temporarily rendered inoperative under the conditions of the world machine.
*Future Forward Feature "Solaris." Cast in concrete from the artist’s father’s wine bottles and plates, the work originates from domestic objects repurposed in the father’s garden to contain motors, soil, and fish feed. The artist’s father, whose name 鴻興 phonetically resembles “red star,” altered the original functions of these objects, displacing the social expectations attached to them. Referencing Sara Ahmed’s "Happy Objects," the work addresses how such functional shifts reconfigure the meanings and emotional associations assigned to everyday objects. Through concrete casting, the artist further transforms these items, fixing them as temporal fragments that register moments in which function, memory, and personal conceptions of happiness are reassembled. As concrete casts, the objects continue to transform through the perceptions of different viewers, extending beyond specific time and space.
