Boundaries

In 2015, at the age of seventeen, Kangrui Liu began studying abroad in the United States. Over the following nine years, he grew and wandered alone on the far side of the Pacific, and returned to China in 2024. This unique life trajectory has led him to a deep understanding of what Martin Heidegger once wrote: " To dwell means to be on earth. Yet humans dwell upon the earth in the way of dwelling within a certain space, in a region, at a place." Every journey Liu has undertaken has been a crossing of boundaries: a repeated process of stripping and reconstructing meaning. As he once noted in his journal, "My dreams have become chaotic, and that chaos has disrupted reality and begun to affect my original memories."

 

For Liu, Chinese culture is his genetic inheritance, while nearly a decade of Western education has deeply reshaped his cognitive landscape. This ongoing "crossing" is not only a geographical migration, but also a prolonged journey through the realms of mind, memory, and language.  His bicultural background leads him to explore the boundaries of art practice persistently. 

 

This exhibition presents six works: To Ruby Beach, Four Corners, Questions, Wu (無), Repeated Scenery, and Balancing the United States. Movement is often seen as an extension of freedom—of thought and of the body. However, the journey of his youth was also a result of leaving his home in China. He lost his sense of home. In To Ruby Beach, his nearly eighty journeys to the beach form a projection of that complex state of mind—an ongoing search for a place where the self may rest amid constant motion.

 

Project Questions merges philosophy with physical displacement and time. The artist poses questions to himself while driving along a highway at night. He set up the large-format camera in the car and exposed the duration of his thoughts. What the camera captures is no longer landscape, but the intertwined movement of body and mind—the traces of time and space themselves.

 

Another core of Liu's artistic practice is challenging the boundaries of the medium. He began with photography but did not confine himself to it. Four Corners transforms two-dimensional images into three-dimensional sculpture, reconstructing and questioning the viewer's spatial perception. Wu (無) cuts and shifts one single photo into a book and concrete sculptures. And form an installation that shifts the image into movements. These experiments break through the authority and hierarchy imposed by medium boundaries—echoing his own navigation across cultural borders.

 

Balancing the United States takes this exploration to a symbolic plane. At the country's geographical center, Liu photographed toward the four cardinal directions. The exposure time is determined by how fast the light travels from the center to each border. Space is thus translated into time. The resulting blurred images eloquently respond to the illusory nature of "center"—suggesting that in a flux world, balance and belonging are never constant. It remains in a state of temporary, dynamic equilibrium, just like that slightly tilted structure.

 

For Kangrui Liu, movement is not merely a language of his body. It is also his approach to exploring the boundaries between different media. Ultimately, his artistic practice elevates "movement" into an act of active construction. He reveals that boundaries are not dead ends, but dynamic zones full of dialogue.

 

Born in 1998, Xuyi, China. Graduated from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Currently lives in Nanjing, China.

 

His work begins with photography and extends to other media, including artist books and sculptures. He focuses on the process of image creation within materiality and space. Through the reconstruction of images and spatial experiments, he explores the relationship between images and reality, memory and observation, and reflects on the boundaries and potentials of photography itself.