Handing Water Its Answers | A Conversation with Jiaqi Liu
- ELSEHERE
- May 20
- 7 min read
Jiaqi Liu’s work begins with a deceptively simple proposition: construct a condition precisely enough that something larger than the artist can begin to unfold. Across technology, imaging, performance, writing, and public-facing works, she is less interested in medium as identity than in the subtle point where structure becomes experience. What matters is not whether a work appears conceptually dense or visually spare, but whether it can open a condition in which contingency, perception, and relation become newly felt. In Dear Water, one of her recent works, a printed sheet carrying scientific answers about water is handed to a body of water and allowed to dissolve. The gesture is small, even absurd. Yet within that absurdity lies a sharp and humbling question: what does it mean for human knowledge to address the world as if the world were waiting to be told what it already is.
ELSEHERE: You describe your work as project-based, concept-driven, and participatory, and you speak of constructing precise conditions while leaving space for contingency, discovery, and reflection. How do you think about that balance between precision and openness in your process?
Jiaqi Liu: My goal is for precision to lead to openness. I have noticed that many of the works I am most drawn to in contemporary art are simple and powerful. Félix González-Torres, Francis Alÿs, Bill Viola, Katie Paterson, they all come to mind. I believe these artists achieve that power because they are extremely precise in how they construct conditions, happenings, and experiences. That is something I strive for in my own practice as well.
When I am making a work, I sometimes experiment a great deal with form. Dear Water went through many drafts. In one version, I was rowing on a lake with equation-engraved oars. In another, I was shouting underwater. The final version is perhaps the simplest, and I would like to think it is also the most precise. The image of a human hand carefully offering to water a piece of paper that contains human knowledge about water most clearly reflects, for me, the contemporary human relationship to nature. We often do things we are convinced are beneficial, and that conviction is grounded in extraordinary knowledge, but that knowledge still only makes sense within human logic itself. So my formal decisions are always led by the concept, and then checked against it again.
I would also say that many of my works are participatory in this sense: I propose the work, but it is completed with the audience. I try to be precise in the part I construct. Once that part is done, the work is still unfinished, and therefore open. The audience is free to enter it, make their own connections, and arrive at their own interpretations.
ELSEHERE: In Dear Water, what made you trust such a spare structure: three philosophical questions, three scientific answers, a dissolving print, a body of water, and a repeated invitation to the viewer?
Jiaqi Liu: I think the work needed to remain that spare because excess would have weakened the relation I wanted to set up. The structure had to be simple enough that the gesture itself could hold. Once there are too many formal layers, the viewer begins to attend to composition as display rather than to the underlying relation between knowledge, language, and the world being addressed. The work needed to stay very close to that one absurd and precise act.
ELSEHERE: The work places scientific language into a performative and fragile situation. What became possible for you when knowledge was no longer presented as explanation, but as something handed over, dissolved, and redistributed?
Jiaqi Liu: In applied mathematics, some equations are considered better than others because they can capture all the variations of a phenomenon across time and space, whereas other equations make concessions through simplification or uncertainty. The Wave Equation, which comprises two of the three answers in Dear Water, is one of those “better” equations. These symbols can record and predict all waves across all time and all three spatial dimensions.
Maybe because I caught a faint whiff of the implicit hubris in all the “alls” in that statement, even though it is technically true, I became very interested in connecting such remarkable knowledge of something with the thing itself. I was fascinated by the action of telling water how it moves while it is already moving, or telling it the components of its being while it is already being. There is something humorous in that. Something humbling too.
Another part of the work that interested me is the form in which human beings provide knowledge. We tend to provide it as answers. “Dear water, here are your answers.” But of course, it never asked.
ELSEHERE: Your statement suggests that art can host eastern philosophy, science, and technology in the same space without flattening any of them. What kind of worldview makes that coexistence feel necessary to you?
Jiaqi Liu: My view is that all theories tend toward one, and all fields of inquiry eventually converge. The pattern and dynamics they converge toward have many names. Dao is the name I am most used to. At certain levels, these disciplines are speaking about the same pattern in different languages. At other levels, they need to complement one another, or are complemented by one another. If Dao is the water itself, then art, philosophy, science, and technology might be the Wave Equation, the H2O formula, an image of a body of water, an audio recording of the ocean, and so on. To me, these disciplines coexist for the convenience of discussing and exploring Dao itself.
ELSEHERE: In Dear Water, the viewer is invited to take a print and bring it to any body of water on earth. What does participation mean to you when the work is completed not by gathering people together, but by releasing the gesture into distance and repetition?
Jiaqi Liu: People are gathered not in a place, but in action. That matters a great deal to me. It is important to the work that the audience physically performs the gesture: bending down to offer the piece of paper, then rising again to watch it dissolve. I believe that carrying out this simple sequence changes the experience substantially. There is a difference between temporarily inhabiting the role of “the human” in the work and simply watching the work happen from outside it.
At the same time, the participatory structure clarifies something conceptually. The work is not really about the relationship between one specific human and one specific body of water. The hand can be any human hand. The water can belong to any body of water. The work is completed through repetition and distance because the relation it stages is general rather than singular.
ELSEHERE: Your practice is project-based and concept-driven, but it also leaves room for contingency, discovery, and reflection. What kind of relation to knowledge are you trying to open for the viewer?
Jiaqi Liu: I am not interested in knowledge as closure. I am interested in what happens when a form of knowledge is made visible as both powerful and insufficient. Scientific answers can be true, and still fail to resolve the condition we are in. Philosophical questions can be profound, and still remain suspended. I think the viewer enters that gap. The work opens a relation to knowledge that is less about mastery than about perspective, scale, and humility.
ELSEHERE: Your bio and statement suggest a practice shaped by technology, imaging, performance, writing, and the public. Across these, what is the question that most consistently organizes your work?
Jiaqi Liu: I think the consistent thread is the relationship between pattern, perception, and communication in contemporary life. I am interested in how natural and social forces unfold once a condition is set, and in how perception is shaped not only by what is present, but also by what is repeated, delayed, dissolved, or withheld. My works are different from one another on the surface, but they often return to that underlying question.
ELSEHERE: When people encounter your work, what do you hope stays with them after the installation is gone, the print dissolves, or the gesture has ended?
Jiaqi Liu: I do not hope for any one particular response. I do not think there is an ideal or correct audience reaction. I am grateful for any and all participation, and I am happy if the work elicits a genuine response, a take-away, or even no take-away at all.
One response I received about Dear Water that stayed with me was from someone who said they would see all waters differently from now on. I found that very moving.
ELSEHERE: When you are no longer present, what would you want the work to continue doing without you?
Jiaqi Liu: I would want it to continue opening a condition. Not to stand in for me or to preserve a fixed message on my behalf, but to keep creating a situation in which viewers can encounter the work through their own timing, attention, and thought. If the work remains alive, I think it will be because it continues to make room rather than because it continues to explain.
Jiaqi Liu's works
Dear Water,, 2026, video installation with sound, bio-ink prints on water-soluble paper, dimensions variable
About Jiaqi Liu
Jiaqi Liu is a project-based, concept-driven artist whose work moves across technology, imaging, performance, writing, and public-facing forms. She has shown and performed work at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Brooklyn Bridge Park, AMC Empire Theater, Microscope Gallery, Czong Institute for Contemporary Art, Jupiter Museum of Art, Galerie KUB, and on public screens in the United States and Europe. She has also been selected and featured by Tribeca Film Institute, Photoville Festival, Backslash, the Wrong Biennale, BarTur Photo Award, Video Art Miden, Digerati Experimental Media Festival, and the Lisa Lu Foundation, among others. Liu holds an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she received the Pritzker Fellowship and was nominated for the AICAD Teaching Fellowship. She previously earned a Dual MS in Computer and Information Science from Cornell University with the Connective Media Fellowship, as well as a BFA with honors from NYU Tisch School of the Arts.
Artist Statement
My practice is project-based and concept-driven. Interdisciplinary and non-medium-specific in nature, my work often engages technology, imaging, performance, writing, and the public. Deeply inspired by philosophies of dynamics and tension from her cultural heritage, I host them in conversations with science and technology to examine pattern, perception, and communication in contemporary life. In my work, I construct precise conditions in which natural and social forces unfold, valuing clarity of intent while leaving space for contingency, discovery, and reflection.
About Inside Out
Inside Out is ELSEHERE’s long-form conversation series, published through STRATUM. It begins from the belief that before artists are understood through category, institution, or medium, they must also be encountered through the deeper structures that shape a practice over time: memory, method, contradiction, relation, and the conditions of life pressing from within the work. This conversation with Chen-Yi Wu has been edited from her written responses for publication.
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