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Did you always know you wanted to be an artist? When did you first start making art? I loved to draw when I was a kid, starting around age five. I told my mom that I wanted to be an artist then, and she said, "You won't make any money." I remember breaking down in tears, but she is definitely not wrong. As an interdisciplinary artist, you work in many mediums including photography, collage, and painting. How do you decide what to use for any given content? I was formally trained in photography, and I love the meditative exercise of just photographing whatever is around me for fun. But when I have a concept that I want to express, I think about the medium that would best help me to express a certain idea. For example, in my woven collage piece "Analog Girl in a Digital World," I wanted to use both analog and digital methods to create that piece, and I ended up using cyanotype (one of the oldest photo printing methods) and juxtaposing it with a digital inkjet print. The square shape of the weave also emulates pixels in my mind. I wanted to express my frustrations at how digitizing everything can make life more complicated.  © Lisa Tang Liu. "Analog Girl in a Digital World." Cyanotype and inkjet print collage. 2023. Could you talk a little bit about how your beautiful projects like "Alchemy of the Unknowns," "self-reconstructed," and "red in nature" came to you? How do ideas for projects come to you in general? What are you hoping for viewers to take away? Thank you for the kind words, Meia. "Alchemy of the Unknowns" is very much influenced by Daoism, the Chinese philosophy that emphasizes harmony and balance and allowing the Dao to flow (the Force in Star Wars is inspired by this concept). My project partner, James David Tabor in Arizona, became friends from discussions about Daoism, after having first connected via a network of toy film camera enthusiasts. We started out with America in mind in our concept - that Massachusetts and Arizona are so different in geography, climate, and politics, that it would be interesting to see photos captured from both places collaboratively. In this project, we each photograph an entire roll of film, rewind it, and send it to the other person, without disclosing what we have photographed. The recipient would then photograph the roll of film as if it's a new roll. So, the images are all accidents. We started the project in 2023, and it's ongoing and evolving to be more of a project about humanity and an attempt to hold on to trust that is eroding in our society. It is very important that the medium is analog for this to happen – though we are not categorically against AI art at all. Film just happens to be the medium to make this concept work, as there are many unknowns in the process of creating.  "Alchemy of the Unknowns" collaboration with James David Tabor "Self-reconstructed" is a collection of work in which I examine my own existence as I enter my fifties – about being American, being ethnically Chinese, being human, being a mother and a daughter, being a woman.
"Red in Nature" was my first time returning to making a new body of photographic work, with intent, since I became a mom. It started in the gloom of the pandemic when I was searching for ways to cheer myself up, and these spots of red grabbed my attention. While being very conscious of being ethnically Chinese and feeling a sense of alienation because of the rhetoric around COVID, I began to pay more attention to plants and animals around me and learned of their origins as native or introduced. For those species that are particularly invasive, the foreign origin is especially tied to them in the language (though even native species can be invasive). Visually, however, these living things are all beautiful, unified by the color red.  "red in nature" by Lisa Tang Liu How did attending the New England School of Photography influence you as an artist? Having been trained in photographic techniques has helped me use photography as a go-to tool to express myself. I think much of my work is rooted in photography. Do you have favorite styles to work in? I think I prefer processes that are tactile, and so I enjoy weaving and using tactile objects in my art. Do you have any favorite tools you use in making art? It's weird to think of this as a tool, but I'm starting to think that I am embracing chance more and more as a tool, and that seems to be correlated to my belief in Daoist philosophy. That also may be why I love the Holga toy camera - there is so little that you can control.  Holga pictures of Boston by Lisa Tang Liu Do you have any favorite artists? Who are some of your influences, in the art world or beyond? My favorite visual artists are probably Kara Walker, Yayoi Kusama, Xu Bing, and Tara Donovan off the top of my head. I'm also very much influenced by the writings of Robin Wall Kimmerer and Annie Dillard. And of course, the Daoist text, Dao De Jing (sometimes spelled as the Tao Te Ching). What have you been working on lately? I'm concurrently working on a few projects. "Alchemy of the Unknowns" is evolving. I'm going back to scanning a binder of flood-damaged negatives from my travels during a road trip across the U.S. with my husband in 2005, with a few in the same binder from 2008 as well. The United States was a different place back then, and the damaged negatives are adding something to my impressions. I also have a cyanotype project that I'm in the middle of.  Scan of damaged negative from Lisa Tang Liu's road trip to The Great Salt Lake/Antelope Island, Utah (2025) What helps nurture your art practice? Curiosity. This is directly related to my Instagram handle @expert.in.nothing. I would never want to become too complacent in my knowledge in any field. Do you have any advice for young aspiring artists? Everyone approaches art in different ways, and art has a different meaning for everyone. So, I can't say can give any real advice except to find out what art means to you and why you're making it.
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