Los Angeles, CA: At Dama Gallery’s Midtown Ventura space, Forma y Funci髇 gathers works in sculpture, photography, painting, and installation around a familiar but unstable pairing: form and function. On view from May 23 through July 26, the exhibition treats function not simply as practical use, but as a condition through which objects are classified, ordered, and assigned value. Its sharper premise is that usefulness is never neutral. It can describe what an object does, but also what it is expected to endure.

Liu’s installation gives this curatorial premise one of its clearest material forms. Drawn from her ongoing project QiQi Chairs Fair, the ceramic work gives the exhibition’s concern with function a pointed social charge. Liu, a multidisciplinary artist working across installation, sculpture, photography, and spatial research, has developed a practice attentive to systems of control, gendered labor, and the social codes embedded in everyday objects and architectural space. Here, she turns to the chair, one of the most ordinary units of designed life, and makes its ordinariness uneasy.
The installation consists of twenty ceramic chairs arranged in a precise grid. The configuration first reads as orderly: repeated units, measured intervals, a structure clear enough to be grasped almost immediately. Yet the work withholds the comfort of sameness. The chairs are uniform in scale but subtly varied in form, their differences small enough to require sustained attention. Liu does not dramatize individuality. She shows how little difference a system may permit while still presenting itself as orderly, accommodating, or complete.

The chair is an exacting object for this inquiry because it is both supportive and positional. It receives the body, but it also fixes that body into place. It promises rest, yet it can imply waiting, service, compliance, and availability. Multiplied and gridded, Liu’s chairs shed the apparent neutrality of functional design. They become units of assigned usefulness, each one occupying its place as though measured against an external standard and required to remain stable, legible, and intact.

Liu’s background in scene design, photography, and architectural studies is evident in the way she treats space as an active structure rather than a neutral container. The grid does not simply organize the chairs. It produces a field of comparison. It asks the viewer to notice consistency, deviation, restraint, and minor difference. What might first appear as formal clarity gradually becomes a mechanism of evaluation, turning looking itself into an act of measurement.

Ceramic sharpens the stakes of that measurement. Clay is worked by pressure, corrected through handling, and made durable through firing. Even when finished, it carries the memory of formation. Liu does not use ceramic to invoke fragility in a sentimental sense. Instead, the material points to a sequence of shaping, discipline, and completion. The question becomes not whether these chairs can function, but what conditions have allowed them to be recognized as finished, stable, and acceptable.

This is where Liu’s installation moves beyond a straightforward meditation on design. The work is not merely about chairs, nor simply about the sculptural transformation of a utilitarian object. It uses the chair to examine how people, particularly women, are made legible through usefulness. The chair’s associations with support and passive availability become a way of thinking about gendered expectation: the demand to hold, to serve, to endure, and to remain composed. Yet Liu avoids reducing the object to a symbol of victimhood. The chairs do not perform distress. Their restraint is what makes them unsettling.

That restraint gives the installation its critical force. Nothing in the work announces itself as protest. Instead, critique emerges through calibration: the measured spacing, the repetition of form, the slight deviations among the chairs, and the material tension between malleability and permanence. Liu understands that control often operates through normalization rather than spectacle. It makes demands appear reasonable. It turns compliance into order and usefulness into virtue.

Within Forma y Funci髇, Liu’s contribution complicates the exhibition’s central terms without abandoning them. Form is not treated as appearance alone, and function is not reduced to purpose. Both become social arrangements. By placing twenty ceramic chairs within a field of disciplined repetition, Liu asks what must happen for an object, or a person, to be regarded as useful, complete, and properly placed. The installation’s quietness is deceptive. Its order is not a resolution, but a pressure.