Fangmeng Liu

About

Fangmeng Liu (b. 2000) is a London-based conceptual artist from China. Her body of work ranges from installations to moving images.

Fangmeng earned a Bachelor’s degree in Philosophy at Peking University in 2022. Following her previous focus on the issue of will in philosophy, her research orbits around the paradox and dilemma of will through unfolding its failures in counterproductive situations such as active forgetting as remembering, attempting to be continent as akrasia, and anti-traces as traces, where one has the willingness or unwillingness towards a certain result, taking actions to achieve or avoid it but obtains the counterproductive unintentional result brought by the will itself.

Installations (including static installations, interactive installations, kinetic sculptures, and large-scale installations) are perceived as prosthetics of will that transform will into action and certain force. By reproducing counterproductive situations in a documentary approach, the vacillation and weakness of will are captured, and the competence of will is manifested through its failure to be trapped in the paradoxes, forming a self-mockery. The sense of humor and unexpected satire emerged from that lie in the heart of her works.

As conceptual art appears as the main form of her practices, the resulting work is a synthesis of philosophical poetics, aphoristic writing, and installation in which she addresses the issues of will, the will to will, akrasia, desire and reason, determinism, fate and luck in a broader contemporary art context.