Siran Liu

MFA Painting

Where Forms Dream the Unnamable

What does it mean to dream?

In Zhuangzi’s butterfly dream, he dreams he is a butterfly. Upon waking, he asks: Am I a man who dreamt of being a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming that I am a man? In the story, dream becomes a state that destabilizes certainty. It is a liminal zone where transformation happens. In it fragments get remixed into new forms; Familiar structures and orders are reborn into new shapes.

For me, the process of painting became very similar to this liminal space of dreaming, where forms can dance and flirt with the line between a thing, a happening, and a feeling. My work draws from written language systems, patterns, everyday objects, symbols, and poetic phrases. Through drawing and sketching, these sources are transformed into abstract shapes, which I use as elements, and visual lexicons. In painting, they are reactivated through color, texture, and mark-making. The resulting images shift between object, space, sign, and atmosphere.

If the painting is a place where forms dream, I am interested in letting them arrive at something unnamable: something that feels familiar, yet not fully identifiable. In this space, seeing is never fixed; it moves between recognition, memory, and imagination.