In Style and Epoch, An Te Liu presents a photographic series in which mass produced, ready-to-assemble furniture, are reinterpreted through processes of mis-assembly and chance construction. Here, functional expediency gives way to a kind of experimental technics, resulting in provisional constructions poised somewhere between the banal and the iconic. Void of their use value, these scraps from our domestic consumer culture conjure the memory of visionary-utopian artistic and architectural experiments from the last century, inviting rumination on the fate of previous vanguards and their aspirations for shaping modern life.

An Te Liu is currently living and working in Berlin, where he is the recipient of the Canada Council for the Arts International Residency for Visual Artist at the Künstlerhaus Bethanien. Displacing familiar objects into altered contexts, his work explores issues of function, malfunction and cultural coding in our built and hypothesized environments. Divergent themes and issues become linked as the work oscillates between object and representation, past and present, and utility and uselessness.

Liu has exhibited in New York, Vancouver, San Francisco, Montreal, Seoul, Frankfurt, and Rotterdam, and more recently at the European Künsthalle in Cologne and the Art Institute of Chicago. This summer his installation, Exchange will be featured in a group show at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. SFMOMA and the Art Institute have both recently acquired works by Liu for inclusion in their permanent collections. In the fall he will present Cloud, a new large scale installation for the Venice Biennale of International Architecture, and a solo exhibition in Berlin at the Künstlerhaus Bethanien, accompanied by a full color catalog on his work. Further examples of his work can be seen at www.anteliu.com