Griffin Liu
- Anna Lilli Garai
- Nov 11
- 6 min read
Yuming “Griffin” Liu is a Chinese-born artist living in the United States. He creates small installations that connect memory and imagination. Using wood, metal, and paint, he constructs spaces that feel intimate and slightly unreal. Works such as “Lucid Dreaming” and “Leakage Report” often begin with everyday details — a sound, a room, or a moment that stays in mind. His installations are thoughtfully designed, linking time, place, and personal experience.
Q: What first drew you to building contained worlds instead of full-scale spaces?
A: Interestingly, I began with large-scale sculptural installations before turning to miniatures. As a sculptor, I’ve always been fascinated by space itself—its presence, its emotional weight. Over time, I realized that the power of space isn’t tied to size or scale. That realization struck me when I first visited the Thorne Rooms at the Art Institute of Chicago: it doesn’t take a massive room to make me feel small.
In creating miniature worlds, I discovered that I could distill all the magic and atmosphere of a full-sized space into something contained. Within these small environments, I have complete control—free from the limits of physics, reality, and, of course, budget. On a practical level, I don’t need $300 to paint a room red; I only need $3. The cost shifts from materials to me—my time, my focus, my craft. The true reward is in perfecting the illusion: making a 12-inch wall feel convincingly like a 12-foot one.
It also has to do with nomadism. I had a nomadic upbringing, moving from city to city and eventually across borders. Because of that, I don’t own many objects; I’ve never known where “home” might be. That sense of impermanence extends into my art. The ethos of minimizing what I carry, of making movement easier, naturally translates into my creative process. My first miniature piece, “Lucid Dreaming,” embodies that perfectly: a surreal, reimagined childhood stairwell built inside a shipping crate, a world small enough to travel with me.
Q: Your sculptures often balance control and chaos. Where do you think that need for control comes from?
A: The need for control comes from a deep sense of powerlessness I felt growing up—that’s the simple answer. I’ve had so many conversations with people raised in very strict households where things like fast food or alcohol were forbidden, and the first thing they do when they reach college is order takeout after takeout or drink until they can’t speak.
It’s not about indulgence; it’s about overcompensation. I experienced something similar, though in a different form. For a long time, I couldn’t feel a sense of agency or autonomy. There are layers to that. On a personal level, I was an anxious child raised in a strict religious household. On a broader level, my family’s faith was considered a cult and persecuted by the government, and we lived under the weight of that stigma: the trauma, the pressure, the constant fear. The voices of my parents, the institution, the state—they were always louder than mine.
If I were to psychoanalyze myself, I’d say my work is a return of the repressed. In these miniature worlds, I finally get to decide everything: what exists, what disappears, and what chaos I allow to unfold under my control. It’s also an ironic gesture toward the vast, chaotic reality beyond me. Inside these small spaces, I can play god. But outside of them, I’m still as helpless as a leaf in the storm.
Q: You describe institutions as both restrictive and connective. How does that paradox show up in your work?
A: Institutions are central oppressors in my work. They exploit, dominate, and rule with an iron wrist. They are entities with will and intent, capable of making decisions that affect countless lives, yet they cannot be pinned down to a single body. Though made up of people, they transcend the individual, speaking not through words but through signs, signals, policies, and rules. They communicate with perfect clarity what they expect and what they forbid, and they demand obedience.
This is the restrictive side of institutions, and it is fully intentional. The stop signs in “Knock Knock” embody this aspect: firm, tyrannical, and normalized to the point of invisibility, symbols of unquestioned authority.
But there is also a connective side, one born not from the institutions’ will but from their consequences. Oppression, paradoxically, unites its subjects through shared suffering. An oppressor becomes the common enemy, and in that shared victimhood, connection begins to form.
In works like “The Edge of the World” and “Alien Condition No. 1,” the flocking of chairs and their collective state of quiet tragedy represent this shared condition. It is the foundation, the prequel, of human connection. In “Leakage Report,” that connection transforms into resistance: the chairs gather and burst through the DWV pipe system, exposing all the hidden anguish and silent suffering that had been contained.
Q: Waiting seems to be a quiet force in your pieces. What kind of space does waiting create for you?
A: Waiting creates a layered kind of space for me. My first instinct is to say it’s an anxious one. The act of waiting can feel powerless; it’s painful because it reveals the moment when there is nothing else you can do. It marks the boundary of your ability, the point where you must hand your agency to someone or something else—to a job interview, a response from someone, or a green card application. But waiting isn’t inherently negative. While it often involves a loss of control, that loss is also a natural part of life. We wait for rain, for a smile, for the birth of new life. There is grace in that surrender.
The space I try to capture in my work is one of quiet tenacity.
The vitality of everyday life isn’t crushed by anxiety or helplessness; it persists. The serenity and poetic quality in my pieces are not a romanticization of pain, but a recognition of life’s dignity—the act of accepting pain as part of existence and continuing to live through it.
Q: When you compress the world into these contained settings, what starts to reveal itself?
A: When the world is compressed into contained settings, what begins to reveal itself is the intensity of emotion and the quiet tension within absence. I am drawn to interior spaces because they imply limitation—a finite boundary that heightens focus. Within these enclosed worlds, emotions seem to condense, becoming denser and more potent. There is a sense of claustrophobia that transforms the space into a site of confrontation; with nowhere to escape, everything—memory, feeling, and atmosphere—becomes more distilled and exposed.
None of my works include human figures. Instead, traces of human presence linger: objects left behind, marks of use, and subtle disarray that hint at what once was. These remnants suggest an open-ended narrative. On one hand, they offer a glimmer of hope that those who once occupied these spaces have escaped whatever occurred there. On the other hand, they erase the human figure entirely, leaving the interiors emptied of life yet full of its echoes.
When I walk into abandoned buildings or enter public interiors that are momentarily deserted, like returning to a classroom after hours, there’s an eerie shift. The empty chairs and tables, meant to host life, now look back at me. It feels as though the space itself has regained subjectivity, reversing the gaze and turning me into the observed.
Time, too, reveals itself in these compressed worlds. Weathering plays a crucial role in my work; it records the slow passing of time and hints at transformation or decay. This prolonged stillness transforms miniature scenes into quiet frames of suspended time, where longing lingers. In these moments, absence becomes a kind of resolution—the space itself holds the emotion once carried by its inhabitants.
Q: Do you think your sense of belonging has changed through building these imagined environments?
A: When I began making miniatures, I was reimagining spaces I had lived in—places drawn from memory that often no longer exist. The process offered relief from nostalgia, though these recreations never replaced the memories themselves. I have always struggled with belonging, moving through places as if they are temporary stops on a one-way train to an unknown destination.
Over time my work shifted from personal memories to spaces that suggest broader social functions: domestic, institutional, public. I no longer build to remember but to understand how people inhabit space. Through that shift my sense of belonging moved inward, finding steadiness not in a place or person but in the act of making.
I think of this process as a form of alchemy. Fragments of experience, observation, and imagination gather and merge somewhere deep in my mind, transforming on their own. Memory, imagination, and time blur together, much like the Aymara belief that we walk backward through life, facing the past because it is what we can see.
I often think of the Jungian orphan—one who no longer trusts the external world and turns inward for strength. I once thought home could be a place, my parents, or someone I loved. Each idea eventually broke apart, and I learned that the only constant companion I truly have is myself.
The spaces I build are shells I have molted, diaries written in form and texture. They trace feelings both personal and shared, quiet proofs that the inner world, with all its shifting memories and resilience, can itself be a place of belonging.
