• Ideas
  • Nov 08, 2019

Moving in Circles: Interview with Liza Lou

Portrait of LIZA LOU. Photo by Zihui Song. Unless otherwise stated, all images courtesy the artist and Lehmann Maupin, Seoul / Hong Kong / New York.

Tactile and visual; muted but resonate; minimal yet expressive—Liza Lou’s works often encompass attributes that should be antithetical but instead are folded within one another. Based in Los Angeles, Lou has been working with beads for more than 30 years. She initially became known for her room-sized installation The Kitchen (1991–96), for which she spent five solitary years covering an entire American middle-class kitchen in a beaded simulacrum of itself. It debuted at the New Museum in New York and launched her career in working with beads. Most recently, she spent more than a decade in Durban, in the South African province of KwaZulu-Natal, working with a studio of Zulu artisans to produce intricate and ambitious installations.