Xinyi Liu (b. Chengdu, China) is an interdisciplinary designer currently based in New York and Shanghai. She holds an MFA in Graphic Design from Yale School of Art (2024), where she received the Yale School of Art Dean’s Prize. Her practice is grounded in visual art. Through image-based approaches, she transforms graphic design into cultural and spatial experiences, creating playful environments that encourage participation and discovery.
Xinyi’s work has received awards from New York TDC and Tokyo TDC, A’ Design Award, and Hiiibrand Award, and has been featured in exhibitions at MoCA CT, West Bund Museum, A4 Art Museum, and Yale CCAM. Her work has also been published in the TDC Annual and Art in Book Form, among other publications. She has served as a visiting critic at Parsons and led workshops for Yale Pathways.
Could you share a bit about your background and how your work developed from your early training in China to your current practice?
I was born in Chengdu and received my early training in China within a traditional art education system that emphasized discipline, structure, and formal precision. That foundation grounded me in composition and visual logic. Growing up during a period of rapid technological and cultural transformation also shaped my perspective. I became increasingly interested in how images operate within shifting social and spatial contexts rather than as isolated visual forms.
At Yale School of Art, I found an environment that encouraged critical experimentation across media. There, I was able to synthesize my formal training with a more open-ended, research-driven approach. My practice gradually expanded from image-making toward constructing systems and environments—frameworks where graphic design functions as a cultural and spatial experience rather than a purely visual output.
Your projects move fluidly between design, material research, and artistic exploration. What draws you to working across disciplines rather than within a single medium?
While some of my projects result in strong visual languages, I’m less interested in pursuing a singular aesthetic. What draws me to working across disciplines is the possibility of constructing situations rather than fixed outcomes. I see design as a framework in which media, materials, and participants interact within specific contexts. The question for me is not only what the final form looks like, but how it operates—whether it creates a dialogue with its audience and environment.
How do research and investigation shape your work, across materials, culture, and emotion?
Research in my practice often begins with an impulse—a curiosity, a desire, or a question I want to pursue. That motivation leads to testing, observing, and drawing from architecture, literature, music, internet culture, and lived environments. Working beyond strictly visual references allows unexpected connections to surface.
IIn In Memory of Digital Decay, shown in Tactile Futures at West Bund Art & Design (2025), created at RELATED DEPARTMENT, I worked in collaboration with studio founder Scarlett Meng on the design of the textile imagery for a diptych. It draws on 1980s–90s Chinese handkerchiefs—hybrid objects shaped by Western pop influence and local mass production—combined with graphic elements reflecting technological shifts from the 1990s to the 2020s. The project traces how visual symbols evolve alongside digital interfaces, making research both cultural excavation and material exploration, carrying traces of memory and emotion.
When engaging viewers, do you imagine them as users, witnesses, collaborators, or something else entirely? In your installations and videos, you often invite a reconsideration of how we interact with objects and images—what role do you envision for a viewer in that dynamic?
I don’t imagine viewers as having a fixed role. In my work, their position shifts depending on the structure and context of the project. Suits for Sandbox was conceived as a “playground”, the surface functions as a musical map, where drawing with crayons triggers rhythmic sounds. The installation is pre-designed, but the outcome depends entirely on how participants engage with it.
The work evolved through three different performances. In one setting, a small group of 10-15 participants interacted collectively; in another, a single musician activated it; in a third, spontaneous visitors joined without prior instruction. Each iteration reshaped the work’s atmosphere and meaning.
Thinking about community, what forms of connection or care guide you, and where do you understand yourself to be within those relationships?
In contemporary society, individuals are often exposed directly to large structural pressures, which can create isolation. I’m interested in how smaller, intentional spaces—temporary or sustained—can provide forms of mutual support and shared meaning.
My practice often reflects this concern with social identity and relational space. I see myself more as a facilitator—someone who constructs frameworks where connection, vulnerability, and exchange can take place. If my work can create even a brief moment of shared attention or collective presence, that already feels meaningful.
Do you have any advice that you would offer to others?
Pay attention to what truly moves you. Long-term curiosity sustains practice. Also, appreciate the details of each moment.
text & photo courtesy of Xinyi Liu
- Website: https://xinyiliu.works
- Instagram: @xinyiliu.bot
