Sewing the self: Art, needlework and Liu Beili’s intersectional identity

Abstract

As a Chinese-born woman living in the United States, Liu Beili is aware of the structurally, politically and representationally formulated intersectionality based on her national origin, ethnicity, language, gender and other factors. As a high-profile artist, Liu’s multimodal, polysemous and intermedial art reflects on the nuance that provides for understanding an intersectional immigrant’s sociocultural experience. Liu analogizes her femininity to water, which is resilient, and regards her art practices as the way to ‘better understand how migration and diaspora impact human experience through encounters and separations, displacements and assimilations, the intimacy of memories, and the gravity of time’. This article scrutinizes Liu’s relational art, social participation and civic engagement by focusing on three pieces of performance-based projects, all involving the traditionally feminine task of sewing. Through the simple act of sewing, Liu investigates multiple experiential discourses on the intersectional community: oppression, repression, displacement, disempowerment, self-empowerment, communication and reconciliation.