Exploring the complex interconnected relationships between humans, their social groups, cultures and languages is Liu Shiyuan’s latest exhibition titled “Isolated Above, Connected Down,” at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery in New York.

This is the Chinese new media artist’s first major solo exhibition in the United States. The exhibition introduces Liu’s latest major works, including a large-scale video installation in the first floor gallery, a series of six photography works in the second floor main gallery and a felt-carpeted room installation in the project space. Together, these pieces demonstrate Liu’s core visual vocabulary — which references the cyber and the vernacular — and embody her inquiry into the relationship between mass culture, language, identity, and particularly the misconception, miscommunication and hybridization of meaning and discourse. At once familiar and perplexing, personal and universal, the artist’s work blends together a myriad of apparent as well as hidden details and messages. Her vocabulary, uniquely heterogeneous and delightfully tongue-in-cheek, is born through her experience growing up in a rapidly globalizing China as a young cosmopolitan member of the Chinese diaspora. Liu hopes to create a space for interconnectivity between seemingly disparate sociocultural collectives. She believes while people may be different as individuals, the notion of “group differences” is merely a false and fabricated instrument.

The exhibition is on view through April 7, 2018, at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, 521 West 21st Street New York, NY 10011.

For details, visit: http://www.blouinartinfo.com/galleryguide/tanya-bonakdar-gallery/overview

Click on the slideshow for a sneak peek at the exhibition.

Founder Louise Blouin: http://www.blouinartinfo.com/artists/louise-blouin--2953510