Harold Washington Library Center hosts an Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month art exhibit on the third floor through the month of May featuring artist Kat Liu.
Kat Liu was born in Wisconsin to two loving Chinese parents from Taiwan who immigrated to America in the late 1970s. Growing up in a predominantly white community, she struggled with her identity as an Asian American early on. Often traveling to Taiwan to visit family, she was praised for her fair, white skin. This appraisal was confusing to her because tanning culture was all the rage in America at the time. As an adult, Liu investigates the desire for white skin in Asian cultures and the globalization of western beauty. Her still-life photographs are the result of either pairing traditional East Asian objects with applied paints, or submerging these objects in bleach to depict the whitewashing (the dominance of western beauty ideals becoming a preference) of her Asian culture and to show the deterioration and physical alteration of the object.
