Bio
Miao Xuan Liu explores the movement of history, grief, power, and affect through bodies and environments. Formally trained in craft, Miao sculpts with materials as varied as clay, textile, foam, found object, and wax, mindful of their poetic undercurrents and inheritances. In this way her sculptural practice engages with contingency, process, and possibility, probing the edges of matter and meaning. In a recent exhibition at Blouin Division (2024), Miao employed cement, pantyhose, wax, human hair, Hei Mu Er Traditional Chinese Medicine mushroom, junk from the railway beside her studio, and AliExpress tourist fans sourced from Toronto's Chinatown to draw relationships between the body and vernaculars of failure and ubiquity, the detritus of daily life that capital renders as waste.
Miao's current interests lie in desire and the fictions which shape their encounter, specifically in the context of the (North)“American Dream”. She is influenced by the theorist Lauren Berlant and their text Cruel Optimism, which describes inventions of social promise that have prevailed since the 1980s, such as “upward mobility, job security, and durable intimacy”, and the inherent contradictions of liberal-capitalist society to fulfill these desires. With material encounter acting as proxies for our own precarious balances, Miao asks how aspirational fictions shape the way we engage with one another and ourselves, and the form of desire unfulfilled, transmogrified, or made anew.
Miao has exhibited with Blouin Division, Patel Brown Gallery, Ignite Gallery, Xpace Cultural Centre, and Hearth Garage, and completed residencies with Silverfish Magazine, Harbourfront Centre, Dias:stories, and Monuments of the Future: transatlantic research exchange on memory culture.
Contact Miao here.
Education
2023 - Bachelor of Art, Material Art and Design, OCADU
2016–2018 - Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Toronto
Selected Exhibitions
2025, Tunnel Vision, Upstairs, Toronto
2025, At The Eleventh Hour, Hearth Garage, Toronto
2024, Fantasies and Foreclosure (solo), Blouin Division, Toronto
2023, Powerhouse, Ignite Gallery, Toronto
2023, Yolk (solo) Xpace Cultural Centre, Toronto
2023, Break it to me Gently, Patel Brown Gallery, Toronto ON
2022, Blueprints for a Collective Home, Shoes Off Collective, OCAD University, Toronto ON
2020, now that the artifice is dissolved, Hearth Garage, Toronto ON
2020, Everything Came Back to Me, the abandoned lot at Cunningham, Toronto ON
Professional Affiliations
September 2025–present, TD Communications & Engagement Assistant, Mercer Union
March–September 2025, Independent Curator, Alexa Hatanaka and Johnny Nghiem at Prince Takamado Gallery, Embassy of Canada, Tokyo
May–July 2025, Interim Communications Coordinator, South Asian Visual Arts Centre
2025, "Solace is a Being Made of Light", two-person play by Philip O'Campo accompanying At the Eleventh Hour at Hearth Garage
2024, Wet Felting Workshop Host on behalf of Shoes Off Collective, Xpace Cultural Centre
2024, Performer with Akash Inbakumar, Partners in Art, ARTrageous Fundraiser
2022–current, Shoes Off Collective, core member
2023, MOCA Emerging in the Arts Workshop, Toronto
2023–2025, Set Dresser, Film Industry, Toronto
Jan–April 2024, Ceramics Instructor, City of Toronto, ON
2023, Artist Talk, Ignite Gallery, Toronto ON
2023, 2024, Fabrication Assistant, Installation Assistant, Alexa Hatanaka, multiple projects, Toronto ON
2023, Artist Assistant, Akash Inbakumar, Toronto ON
2022, Felting Workshop Host, Shoes Off Collective, Toronto ON
2022, Weaving Workshop Host, Silverfish Magazine, Toronto ON
2020–2023, Monitor, Plastics Fabrication Studio, OCAD University, Toronto ON
2018, NSERC, Undergraduate Student Research Award, University of Toronto, Botany Laboratory under supervision of Dr. Rowan Sage
Residencies
2023, Dias:stories: Tender Curiosities, SSHRC Funded Workshop and Community Research Group
2023, Xpace OCADU Graduates Residency, Toronto
2021–2022, Monuments of the Future, International Dialogue on Design, Research, and Memory Culture, OCADU, Harvard University, Goethe Institute, and Academy of Media Arts Cologne, Toronto and Germany
2022, Metal Studio Summer Resident, Harbourfront Centre for Craft and Design, Toronto ON
2020, Silverfish Magazine, Artists and Writers Residency, Toronto ON
Press
2024, Cunt Magazine Issue 1