Kai Liu

Kai Liu is a Chinese-Canadian artist whose practice is rooted in painting and extends into printmaking and mixed media. Working through a semi-abstract language grounded in observation, Liu explores the relationships between landscape, nature, perception, and transition. His compositions draw from Eastern aesthetics, bringing together stillness and movement, structure and openness, clarity and ambiguity.

Born and raised in China, Liu studied drawing and painting before moving into animation. After relocating to Canada, he worked as a graphic designer in Ontario before settling in British Columbia to pursue the visual arts. The landscapes around him opened a new way of seeing, shaping a practice attentive to place, movement, and the ways belonging can shift across geography. Liu studied printmaking at Langara College and holds a BFA and MFA from Emily Carr University of Art + Design. His work has been exhibited across Canada and featured in various publications, and he also teaches visual arts in academic and community settings.

Liu approaches landscape as a site of change rather than a fixed view. Coastal, urban, and imagined environments appear in his work as “shifting fields” shaped by light, shadow, and atmosphere. Printmaking informs his sense of structure, rhythm, and surface, while painting and mixed media allow those structures to loosen, opening the composition into more fluid spatial relationships.

Guided by Eastern artistic principles of void, spatial openness, and the flow of time, Liu distills representational references into contemplative compositions that invite recognition without settling into literal description. His work reflects an attentiveness to quiet intervals, where the external world and internal sensation meet. Through layered surfaces and shifting spatial arrangements, Liu creates landscapes that ask the viewer to pause, look closely, and engage in the act of seeing. To Liu, "“Each work is an invitation to pause within these intervals, to navigate spaces where clarity and obscurity coexist, and to engage in the layered act of seeing.”