Nan Liu: Ink Figure Paintings

Born in Tianjin, China, in 1974, Nan Liu is an artist of a realist bent – and at the core of realist art is observation of one’s immediate world and the people who inhabit it. As Liu explains: “My vision reflects the multicultural nature of contemporary America. I depict a primarily African-American world as seen through Chinese-American eyes, with a sensibility that has been fused within both contemporary and classic influences from East and West. In my recent work, I attempt to create a series of life-size figurative paintings with ink medium. My chosen subjects are the students I walk amongst every day on the FAMU campus. Teaching at a historically black college, most of my students are African-American. In this series I attempt to apply traditional Eastern painting media and concepts to represent the lives and world of my contemporary American students”.