Bernardo Liu’s work operates at the intersection of emotional memory and cultural displacement, exploring how Eastern legacies survive, transform, and reorganize themselves within everyday Brazilian life. As a descendant of Chinese immigrants, Liu approaches ancestry not as a return to a fixed origin, but as an unstable layer, marked by gaps, erasures, and reinventions. His work operates in this interstice, where tradition, nostalgia, and globalization intersect without merging.

A central aspect of his practice is the creation of what the artist calls “affective tapestries,” visual surfaces that accumulate signs, objects, and references that function as fragments of family and cultural histories. These elements rarely appear in a direct or narrative form; rather, they emerge as traces, echoes, or clues, composing a visuality that speaks more of residual presence than of explicit representation.

For Liu, ancestry is not a static symbol, but a mode of circulation. His works explore how objects — from porcelain to small Eastern talismans, from graphic patterns to household items — carry layers of meaning that span generations, migrations, and symbolic boundaries. He investigates the trajectory of these objects as part of a global economy marked by consumption, exoticization, and displacement, but also by affection, care, and memory.

Globalization, in his poetry, does not appear as an abstract theme, but rather as a phenomenon experienced firsthand: the intersection between Rio de Janeiro and China takes place at the level of the body, the home, and memory. His works explore the hybrid condition of the diasporic subject, who simultaneously inhabits an inherited culture and a lived culture, without either imposing itself absolutely.

Thus, the artist’s work constructs a visuality where memory, displacement, and the domestic imaginary form a narrative that is neither linear nor entirely legible, but deeply affective. He reinscribes in the present that which persists at the margins: small objects, everyday gestures, fragments of images that function as anchors of identity. His practice shows that Eastern memory in Brazil is not merely a historical archive, but a living matter in constant negotiation, charged with tension and delicacy.

Liu has held the solo exhibitions Alva, Hua International, Berlin, Germany (2026), in partnership with Claraboia, São Paulo, Brazil; Ba Bao Fan, Refresco, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (2025), and Ginseng, Largo das Artes, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (2024). His work has been included in group exhibitions such as Oasis Graal, Espaço Caroço, São Paulo, Brazil (2025); Quermesse, Instituto Inclusartiz, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (2022); and Catavento23, an independent exhibition held in São Cristóvão, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (2023). In 2023, he also conceived the exhibition TANGRAM alongside Daniel Frickmann.