ABOUT
Zihan Liu (刘梓涵) is SZECHUAN-born, NYC-raised. Since graduating Magna Cum Laude from PRINCETON UNIVERSITY with a B.A. in Sociology and minors in Information Technology and Dance, she focuses on investigating power, capital, and value in cultural markets. Her practice spans across many disciplines and is shaped by intentional, collaborative exchanges with artists, musicians, designers, dancers, filmmakers, writers, and researchers.
As a working model, Liu navigates the paradox of being both subject and object. Drawing from her direct experiences in fashion, art, and performance, she uses photography, writing, dance, acrylic paint, and collage to explore the commodification of identity across various aesthetic markets. She embraces the chaos of everyday life and builds her work around its complex social and cultural challenges. Through trial, error, and imperfection, she finds beauty in the fleeting, flawed, and transient.
I’m deeply curious about power; how it circulates and whom it controls. Especially in the recent decade, economic inflation, political upheaval, and social unrest have made madness and chaos the new normal. On a personal level, instability has been central to my own upbringing and how I’ve navigated family complexities, unconventional career paths, and eclectic everyday routines. Yet simultaneously, this craziness drives my curiosity. Because when the world goes insane, how do we make sense what is supposedly sane?
So far, I’ve been investigating these questions in Fashion, Music, and Art. Within these pockets of social life, power is immediately felt, experienced, and contested. As a “creative” in a “creative” field, I encounter an abundance of content; too often an oversaturation of spectacles and trends that rarely leave any lasting value or impact. After all, we are in the digital age where data is king and quantity trumps quality.
Amid this noise, I pay close attention instead to minutiae of everyday life; how people connect with one another and engage with the cultural systems that surround their daily living. Through interviews and conversations, I observe the different ways power is internalized, performed, and reproduced. And in turn, I find what is most revealing about ourselves and the world is not necessairly rooted in the specacular or extraordinary, but instead emerges from the commonly overlooked and seemingly ordinary.