Liu
Lobbin Liu is a graphic designer based in Brooklyn. She sets her sights on not only something conventionally appealing but also something that people usually ignore, avoid, or consider taboo. In her works, you see how ordinary as well as unconventional sparks can be projected onto her practices and how the way of working influences the critical sight of her daily life. Intentionally or not, her works are rooted in the moments of discomfort within conventional beauty and allure. She seeks the poetic within the failures, dilemmas, confusions, clumsiness, frustrations, and stupidities that she deals with every day.
Lobbin works in visual design, digital interactives, spatial graphics, performance, and more. Her works try to create unconventional experiences by fusing senses and by merging disciplines. Her collaboration with scientists, engineers, and musicians reimagines and breaks the boundary of what role design plays in various contexts. Her works have been juried and awarded by Tokyo TDC, New York TDC, GDC committees, etc, and have been exhibited in New York, Tokyo, Beijing, Los Angeles, Paris, Shanghai, and more. She has been invited to talk and critique at multiple academic and artistic institutions in the United States like Rhode Island School of Design, New York University, Boston University, etc., and in China like Shanghai Institute of Visual Art, Graphic Design in China Committee, Shenzhen Technology University and more. Lobbin holds a MFA from the Yale School of Art and a BFA from RISD.
Lobbin also publish under the name lob_in Press and work on branding under the name FDMT Design. To request for our work samples, please email lobbinliu@gmail.com
- 2023
- performance lecture
- In the performance lecture. I gathered four bilingual speakers. Without hearing each other, my participants listened to my narrations through the headphones on them. I read the scripts based on my collection in their original languages(mostly Chinese); my participants translated what they heard into English at the same time. Through the process of receiving, interpreting, and re-narrating, memories are reformed into various shapes.
- I use language to solidify these fragments of regret. However, I doubt whether such an emotion, a psychological effect, can truly be restored by words. In my collection, there are also some objects under the theme such as a colored teardrop. Steiner was deeply touched by it; she believed it was poetic and emotional. However, what I did not say was that this single tear was squeezed out of my sheer will for the purpose of this archive. It is difficult to measure how much of the imagined and projected emotion is in this sample. Similarly, I wonder if the regrets shared by the narrators are natural crystallizations of their complicated memories; how much of it is artificially synthesized to display or perform.