Hanx Liu

New York-based artist Hanx Liu explores political critique through unconventional mediums. In his latest series, Mass Within Calibers, he replaces brushes with firearms, creating calligraphic compositions using bullet holes instead of ink.

By merging the elegance of Eastern calligraphy with the calculated violence of modern weaponry, Liu’s process—both destructive and creative—creates striking artistic tension.

Currently on display at Liu’s solo exhibition, which opened January 8 at The Blanc Gallery in Midtown Manhattan, Mass Within Calibers has drawn over a thousand visitors. The exhibition visually explores macroeconomic mechanisms in the post-globalization era, critiquing neo-colonialism and economic imperialism. By transforming economic discourse into tangible art, Liu challenges audiences to reconsider how power structures shape the modern world.

The Conference 

2023

50.8CM x40.64CM

Oil on Canvas

In The Conference,Hanx Liu employs a restrained monochromatic palette to stage an uncanny assembly: a council of rats rendered as allegorical stand-ins. Stripped of individual traits, they embody collective bodies emptied of identity yet charged with historical resonance.

By reconfiguring the conventions of portraiture, Liu inverts its function: individuality dissolves into archetype, while the familiar gravitas of historical likeness gives way to an inquiry into how representation manufactures consensus, offering not a record of figures but a meditation on anonymity, ritual, and the uneasy architectures that bind historical assemblies.

The Jenny’s Poems

2023

60.96CM x45.72CM

Ink on Canvas

In Jenny’s Poems, Hanx Liu departs from conventional draftsmanship by replacing hatching and contour lines with dense fields of handwritten text. The image, a reclining skeleton rendered with near-clinical realism, emerges not from graphite or brush but from the accumulation of words—poems written by a friend of the artist.

Here, the very strokes that traditionally serve only as formal scaffolding are recharged with semantic weight. Line becomes language; shading becomes rhythm; light and shadow unfold through the density and thickness of script. The work thus converts the mechanics of illustration into an act of inscription, where representation is no longer mute but layered with meaning.

At the core of this piece lies a potent juxtaposition: poetry and death, vitality and decay. By binding the intimate voice of verse to the silent form of a skeleton, Liu expands the horizon of representational art, demonstrating how the visual and the textual may converge to reframe both mimesis and metaphor.