After All

Chongyan Liu (b. 1995, Guizhou, China) is a visual artist and filmmaker working between France and China. She began her formal training in painting at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing (2013-2017), after which she continued her studies at the Beaux-Arts de Paris, obtaining a Diplôme National Supérieur d’Arts Plastiques in 2022 under the mentorship of Atelier Cogitore and Atelier Halilaj-Urbano. In 2024, she completed a residency at Le Fresnoy – Studio National des Arts Contemporains, where she expanded her practice in visual arts with a focus on multimedia and audiovisual experimentation.

Chongyan’s work is informed by her perspective as a second child born amid China’s socio-cultural transformation. Spanning moving images, installation, sculpture, and painting, her practice employs what she calls "total image-making" — a process of creating, reclaiming, and re-contextualizing images across multiple media. Through this approach, she invites audiences into layered sensory experiences, constructing speculative audiovisual spaces that probe how today’s socio-economic contradictions, intensified by technological acceleration, drive individual isolation and obstruct the evolution of personal into collective memory.

Her work has been featured in prominent international exhibitions and film festivals, including IDFA (Netherlands), Jogja-NETPAC Asian Film Festival (Indonesia), the Beijing International Short Film Festival, Videoex (Switzerland), and Lo Schermo dell’Arte (Italy). Her upcoming feature documentary, Niche of the Dragon, was recently selected for the Doc Station Talent Lab at the 74th Berlinale, a significant milestone in her exploration of hybrid documentary forms.