Caroline Liu’s exhibition at the Gallery One Art Vault in Albuquerque City Hall lures you in then hits you with a one-two punch about erased histories and Asian marginalization.
ALBUQUERQUE—Finding Caroline Liu’s exhibition at Albuquerque City Hall takes on the excitement of searching for a downtown speakeasy— mention the show to a Public Art staff member at Gallery One and they’ll motion you through a side door to the Art Vault, a surprise gallery that hosts intimate shows—if you can figure out how to get in. Once you decipher the secret code that opens the Gallery One Art Vault, there’s magic the moment you step inside: the lavender-colored room bursts with Liu’s brilliantly colored daisies and stuffed zinnia pillows. It’s a wonderland of blooming flowers and glowing blood-orange paper lanterns against an indigo sky. Each pop art pistil painted on the walls unfolds revealing a shy face with sleepy, soulful eyes.
It looks like a Hanna-Barbera cartoon from your Saturdays long ago, right down to the Jellystone Park trailhead bulletin board display outside the vault. But look closely: those aren’t campground notices. Each of the handbills, printed in large caps and exclamation points, screams racist jabs—NO MORE CHINESE! HIP! HOORAH! CHINESE EXCLUDED!—and are illustrated with stereotypes: an angry Uncle Sam kicking a man in the back of his silk trousers.
Suddenly, you notice a photo of a smiling Chinese family appearing amid the handbills and a 1925 news article extolling the beauty of a local Chinese garden in the Mimbres Valley of New Mexico: “An oasis in the desert… for forty-one years and still at it.”
Inside the vault, Liu’s multimedia installation of illustrated and soft-sculpted flowers is gorgeously subversive. The lamps are symbols of a family’s thriving life in a viticultural, or winemaking, community. Faces in the flowers are actually menshen, Chinese spirits and deities that inhabit the space and protect one from harm. Liu reinterprets the satire of Takashi Murakami’s disaffection with Western art trends but adds an unexpected sting—think Hello Kitty with a whip.
“It’s pretty intentional,” chuckles Liu, who points out the dualities in her eight-foot-by-eight-foot bank vault exhibition, titled Chinese Garden. “It lures people in with its softness, but it unpacks realities in front of them.” The images are simple and tranquil, but, she says, that’s the dichotomy with what’s in view. “It’s beautiful, but political. The landscape becomes more hostile.”
And it still remains that way, says Liu. The inspiring beauty of the Mimbres Valley is also deceptive. Much of the bigotry and persecution of Asian people throughout New Mexico and the West has been swept under the rug for the past 150 years. It took Liu a lot of work to uncover the story of the Wah family, which inspired the exhibition and tells a story about the Southwest that’s less than enchanting.
“[It was] a lot of piecing together puzzle pieces,” says the multimedia artist, who uses her work not only to explore the past, but her own cultural identity as a bi-racial Asian American woman. “A lot of sections of the story I had to figure out when I was learning about the location, Mimbres Valley… It became important—this Chinese farm in the middle of nowhere but [that] served the surrounding towns.” Enveloped by intolerance and hate, Liu says many Chinese like the Wahs clung to each other for support, presenting themselves as model immigrants and burying the pain of racism, while being both excluded and used as expendable labor. The daughter of a Chinese parent, Liu says developing the exhibition made her consider her father’s own hidden experience in the U.S. when he immigrated in the 1970s.
“My brain exploded—how can this narrative be pushed? I uncovered a desire in myself to stand up for the history of the Chinese. I have a platform they never had,” she says. For six months Liu completely immersed herself, physically stitching and translating those silent experiences into a fantastic land of layers of bright pink, yellow, and blue fabric with threads that began to have their own dialect. Puffy three-dimensional flowers with symbolic eyes—like the voiceless ancestors—watching, protecting, and reminding Liu and other Chinese people they aren’t alone. A surreal ideology of plant life that’s magical to look at, but hard to digest. And that’s exactly the reaction Liu wants to evoke from the viewer.
“It’s important to have this installation,” says Liu, “because it pokes at a part of history that people forget. I’ve lived in New Mexico a little over eleven years. While I love it, there’s not a lot of Asian-ness.” Chinese Garden offers a wondrous invitation to the magic and beauty of Chinese life in America—born from mythology and displacement, culture and cruelty—while offering a pull-no-punches reminder of the reality of marginalization, through the combination of seemingly animated sculpture, and illustrations and portraits of the Wah family among the collage of denigrating racial and political attacks.
That’s the subversive beauty of Liu’s exhibition. Although it’s about the Chinese experience, it’s not very stereotypically Chinese. It’s an in-your-face protest that forces the viewer to examine what they know about their own history, what’s missing, and why.
“This new generation of Chinese is loud,” says Liu, smiling while playing with her bright turquoise nails, as if she was suddenly revealing a secret. “It makes everyone else uncomfortable.”
Caroline Liu’s Chinese Garden is on display in the Art Vault at Gallery One, Suite 1400 on the first floor of Albuquerque City Hall through April 18, 2025.
