Cece Liu is a contemporary artist working primarily in graphite and charcoal. Born in Shanghai, China, she grew up across several midwestern states as a young child. As a result of frequent displacement in her childhood, she developed a keen desire to understand how self identity is impacted by cultural and societal influences. Liu frequently uses the horse as a motif to explore the fragility of communication, the unspoken tension between control and consent, and the movement of power—how these all affect our individual perceptions of personhood, displacement, and freedom. Her work draws attention to objects or motions frozen in time, choosing a medium that requires meticulous technicality and time to perfect, a dedication to the complexities and nuances of the themes she explores. She currently lives and works in Los Angeles.
“Staying with the trouble requires learning to be truly present, not as a vanishing pivot between awful or edenic pasts or apocalyptic or salvific futures, but as mortal critters entwined in a myriad of unfinished configurations of space, times, matters, meanings.”
—Donna J. Haraway
WHY I DRAW HORSES
Drawing is a way of seeing. When you meditate on a subject for tens of hours, sometimes hundreds of hours at a time, you begin to know it quite intimately. It’s also a way to immortalize, to preserve, and to acknowledge. Everything is fleeting these days—it’s no longer fifteen minutes of fame, it’s perhaps fifteen seconds, and that’s even asking a lot. Here in LA you viscerally feel the recoil of the creative industries from being squeezed so hard that their work is barely a shadow of what it could be. And there’s no time.
I could never not draw horses, but for the longest time I didn’t know or ask myself why. My first real attempt at taking a particular work seriously was titled What is Inevitability and shown in Hong Kong, depicting a powerful work horse being enticed by an apple, offered by a robotic hand. A little too on the nose. I hadn’t really understood what it meant to “see” beyond the obvious, because that’s what our present consumerism is, isn’t it—instant gratification, instant knowing. The intensity of an idea so juicy, yet fleeting, that you must capture it because you fear it will leave you just as quickly as it came. Indeed, fear drives impatience.
A horse will not tolerate impatience. A horse will not tolerate a lot of things, and for anyone who has spent any time with them, you know that this particular pursuit of beauty, as with all honest pursuits, is a labor of love. Everybody eventually comes to their rightful place, appropriating tools, building relationships, developing instincts that go beyond only riding and connect with the whole art of being, of balance, and of intention.
The horse is a living, breathing reminder of impermanence and inevitable change. One of my favorite ruminations on this is by James Rosenquist on the occasion of seeing his monumental F-111 taken apart and sold in parts: “Years ago when a man watched traffic going up and down 6th avenue, the traffic would be horses and there would be a pulsing, muscular motion to the speed on the avenue. Now what he sees may be just a glimmer, a flash of static movement, and that idea of nature brings a strange […] idea of what art might become.”
Perhaps it’s apt that it’s primarily women who have imagined a more intertwined becoming between what is nature and what is not. Ursula K Le Guin’s highly anthropologically influenced work includes that of the fictional planet of Geffen, exploring why a society inhabited by ambisexual humanoids was warless. Donna Haraway’s writings on both human-machine and human-animal relations delve into the ideas of tentacularity and entanglement, and the belief that a better world can exist, but only through benevolent and intentional co-existence; “a life lived along lines—and such a wealth of lines—not at points, not in spheres.” The list of feminist writers imagining a more peaceful world of co-existence is long.
As humans there are few species we have entangled ourselves with as much as the horse, probably up until the very moment in history that Rosenquist pondered his own artistic fate. Electricity and the combustion engine altered our relationship with horses completely, and as we look down the barrel of the latest AI, I can’t help but think that every time I’m in the presence of a horse, it’s looking at me with a knowing, if not slightly sympathetic, gaze.
I draw horses to meditate on and memorialize the vastness of our human progress, our human hubris, and our human mark on this shared world. By using the horse as a mirror to ourselves—something riders know deeply about—my work explores concepts of tension between control and consent, beauty in the visceral and vulnerable, and truth in the eye of the beholder.