He Liu

About

He Liu [鹤] is a space lighting designer focused on developing a therapeutic approach through various media and technique across analogue and digital formats, patterns and shapes. Before studying at RCA, He Liu completed her Bachelor's Degree in Fashion Design at Parsons in New York, where she discovered the fascinating world of transforming patterns and creative construction. 

With her sensitive and delicate emotional expression on the subtleties of life, He Liu’s design always relished an attention to detail and embraces the meticulous nature of craft. Her aim is to take the viewers back to the memory of the depths of time through her narration on the unintentional beautiful moments in life with dynamic light spots, to face the subtle tremors of the soul, and indulge in beautiful reverie.

Contact

Degree Details

Statement

Every Beating Moment

The project chiming with the desire to forge meaningful connections with our living environment, discovered the creative connection on how peace and serenity memories of experiencing the impermanent nature often offer an energetic response to the well-being in space from day to night that subtly engages the viewers with real and imagined natural forces.

Draws on light, reflection, and perception, combining them with the dynamic natural or artificial lights that creates an embodied aesthetic experience in both material and immaterial. “Embers'' is a constructed metal collection designed for urban landscape.

Catches the lights in between the incisions through the formalized reflective structure, He Liu intend to create a moment of pause and allow the viewers to wonder how their movements connects to the larger patterns of the cycles of time. Transition a space from a mundane zone to actively reinvigorate space through the fluidly moving illuminations from day to night, her aim is to create a motivating and inspiring space that contemplates the possibilities of time with the interacting illuminated surface, to amplify human emotion and imagination as one walks around it. 

Keywords: transformation, reflection, perception, space, light

Every Beating Moment

Constructed in 20 pieces free-formed transformable metal pieces, each pattern is designed based on the subtle regularity of the natural phenomena with the formalized incisions that catch the lights and connected to the limitless sky with twinkly dancing illumination. As sunlight shines on the structured pattern they sparkle with iridescent colors that move across the sculpture.

Medium: aluminum, brass, nickel silver

Research/Concept

Experiment on creating an illuminated pattern with the aesthetic of using dots and stripes to formalize the pattern with the multi-angled reflective structures. The sparking effect that twinkles dance in the air is the key ingredient for transferring this magic mood.
Referring to unconscious inference, an effect is that some of our perceptions arise from unconscious references to the assumptions of our environment —— when an object is interpreted in multiple ways, such as the rhythm of some arrangement of the superposition and the reflection of the lights in some simple shape structures, our cognition can be interpreted in multiple ways that activate the corresponding oriented processing feature detectors in the cortex.

Experimentation

Shape & Structure
Shape & Structure
Shape & Structure
Shape & Structure
Lighting Experimentation
Lighting Experimentation

Idealization

The structure’s form is a physical manifestation of interconnectedness inspired by the subtle regularity of the leaves waves rippling across the sunlight – when any one element moves, every other element is affected.
In this piece, the etched metal form is both chaotic and harmonious at the same time, rolled to a column that resembles the structure of trees. The dotted patterns as the reflected waves are projected onto a wall, exist as a social sculpture for the street's residents to convey a sense of relaxation and well-being. In the dark distance, you will see the shimmering lights in between the incisions that revealing magic by night, as a manner evocative of falling rains.
Sundial
Sundial — The sculpture rises along facades reaching for the sky, and activated by sunlight as a sundial that casts a long shadow on the junction. As the sun falls on it at different time of day, each side of the shadows present the passage of time.