My Story
A Brief Biography
Qinqin Liu is an interdisciplinary artist with her Ph. D in botany and continued art education at the universities and colleges. Dr. Liu creates interplay artwork based on her 30 years’ experience as an artist & scientist. She enjoys challenges and growth in creating contemporary artworks envisioning questions about nature, time, uncertainty, risk, vulnerability, relationships, conflict, human inner and external space, culture and equity in our life and living environments.
She works primarily in drawing, Chinese ink, watercolor, acyclic, water-based mixed media and collage with natural materials and objects. Her art work is inspired by natural beauty and great values of biodiversity and mother earth as an environmental scientist and a biologist. Her major artistic interest and life-time goal is to create art with joy and a sense of responsibility for human health and sustainable living earth. She loves plein air painting and drawing, and couples her art with scientific experience to capture connections between key ecosystem elements from white mountain snow to green forest and blue watersheds from her heart and soul. Particularly, she enjoyed beginning her observation and artwork in natural environments such as the state and national parks in west coast to support her later studio artwork. She was taught Chinese ink painting and calligraphy before coming to the US. Integrating Chinese calligraphy and design elements into Western art styles and connecting art and science contribute to the unique character of her artwork.
Transformation between the contexts of tradition and modernity creates her impressionist and abstract styles of contemporary artworks that have been exhibited at museums and galleries, corporations and conferences, including in: Yosemite National Park, art college and school in New York and Los Angeles, Duluth Art Museum, the Taiwan Science Museum, California Art Center, The Crocker Art Museum, CSU-Sacramento Art Gallery, Intel Corporation, American Ecological Conference, Berkeley Art & Friends, and California Water Color Association.
Her current artwork is to push her limits and to touch peoples’ deep feelings and emotions about vulnerability, risks, uncertainty, changing of their living environments, their desire for inner peace, love, passion, justice, equity, healthy life and appreciation of diverse culture. She also served as a co-director for the GASES Network for Global Art Science Environmental & Sustainability in Sea Change.