Xinyu Liu

Xinyu Liu (born 1996, Hangzhou, China) is a visual artist and photographer currently based in Eugene, Oregon. Working primarily with photography, his practice explores how the built environment mediates power, access, and memory. Navigating the spatial politics of urban landscapes and the afterlives of historical trauma, Liu investigates the social function of architecture and its often-invisible power implications. His work engages with the tension between personal memory and collective histories, reconstructing psychological landscapes that render historically significant sites as sites of memory where the past is preserved and reinterpreted. 

As a foreigner moving through the American landscape, Liu uses photography as both orientation and disruption—a mode of tracing his own echoes within infrastructure while decoding the spatial and ideological scaffolding of contemporary life. His photographs act as sites of inquiry, asking: What physical and conceptual structures shape our everyday environments? Which systems of political and economic power do they uphold or resist? And how can our visual practice expose, challenge, and reimagine these systems to open space for more equitable ways of navigating the world? 

He is currently a MFA candidate at the University of Oregon, winner of Urbanautica Institute Award 2023, Jan Zach Memorial Scholarship, Joe and Alona Fischer Scholarship Fund Award. In the past year, his works has been shown in gallery in Seattle, Portland, Fukuoka, Athens, Eugene and Shanghai.  His first book Rain or Coincidences was published by Buckman Journal in 2024.