Kathy Liao is known for her large figurative works that translate her lived experience and history into colorful, luminous, multi-layered compositions, that often portray herself and family. During the isolation of the pandemic, Liao’s paintings revealed the loneliness and distance of that experience and made it tangible.
In Liao’s newest work, We Met in a Dream, the intimacy of story is mirrored by the intimacy of scale. Liao uses the immediacy of working in a small size to summon stories from her memories, or the trance of a dream, to the poetry of painting and collage. These explorations are full of movement, leaving clues and pointing the way.
“I woke up one day from a dream where my little sister turned into a fly. I reached and grasped for her, to protect her, to keep her safe. I felt deep panic, guilt, and dread. In the moments before waking, I cupped three dead flies and I couldn’t tell which one was her.
I started a dream journaling practice a year ago. Each drawing is a strange affirmation and quiet unraveling of the human drama in my mind. My work exists in the fluid state between experience, memory, dream, and place. In an attempt to translate the fleeting and subconscious, at the intersection of history and time, the drawings shapeshift and settle into allegories of their own.” -Kathy Liao
Biography
As a Taiwanese American artist, Kathy Liao looks for patterns and repetitions that weave through the immigrant families’ experience in her mixed-media work. She is the recipient of various recognitions, including the 2023 Joan Mitchell Foundation Fellowship, 2022 21c KC Artadia Award, 2020 Charlotte Street Foundation Visual Artist Award, and a public art commission for the new Kansas City International Airport. Her work was shown in galleries and museums in Boston, New York, Los Angeles, Seattle, Kansas City, and many other cities nationally and internationally. As a mentor and educator, Liao lectured and presented at multiple institutions and conferences nationwide. Formerly, Liao was Director of the Painting and Printmaking department at Missouri Western State University. She was nominated “Most Influential Professor” in 2019. She is currently the organizational services program officer at Mid-America Arts Alliance.
