One Wish and Two Prayers

Artist Name

Qingfang Liu

One Wish and Two Prayers turns to "huamo", the ornate steamed bread of northern China made for ritual and celebration, as both material and metaphor. Through sculpture and moving image, artist traces the layered histories folded into this humble yet ceremonial food: agricultural cycles, ritual practice, folk aesthetics, industrial transformation, and the residues of post-technological life. Rather than treating *huamo* as mere culinary heritage, Liu positions it as a living bridge between inherited memory and the modern world. In tracing its evolution from hand-kneaded dough to mass-produced symbol, she discovers not a straight line but an upward spiral, moving from traditional agriculture to contemporary industry and revealing a complex cultural and ecological landscape. In this work, the making and unmaking of bread becomes a structured narrative, a way of holding the intertwined histories of northern China in tangible form.

Artist Statement

Qingfang Liu (b. 2006, Shandong) works across installation, moving image, and mixed media. Growing up immersed in folk arts, she developed an early sensitivity to how intangible humanistic spirit can take tangible form. Her practice moves through ongoing field research into living cultural heritage, yet does not settle in preservation, instead, she treats material and gesture as a language for articulating the friction between inherited memory and present urgency.

Drawing from sensory memory of touch, rhythm, and duration, she constructs environments where light, texture, and time become narrators of the unseen. She is drawn to overlooked material qualities, habitual movements, and social traces embedded in everyday life, translating them into works that hover between the tangible and the remembered. Through an analogical, visceral approach, she opens free associations that allow multiple selves hidden beneath consciousness to surface. Her installations and moving images invite viewers into an intimate suspension of time, where history and the future quietly negotiate.

Exhibition Statement

One Wish and Two Prayers turns to "huamo", the ornate steamed bread of northern China made for ritual and celebration, as both material and metaphor. Through sculpture and moving image, artist traces the layered histories folded into this humble yet ceremonial food: agricultural cycles, ritual practice, folk aesthetics, industrial transformation, and the residues of post-technological life. Rather than treating *huamo* as mere culinary heritage, Liu positions it as a living bridge between inherited memory and the modern world. In tracing its evolution from hand-kneaded dough to mass-produced symbol, she discovers not a straight line but an upward spiral, moving from traditional agriculture to contemporary industry and revealing a complex cultural and ecological landscape. In this work, the making and unmaking of bread becomes a structured narrative, a way of holding the intertwined histories of northern China in tangible form.