Liu Kincheloe

Liu Kincheloe (b. 1985 in Torrance, CA) lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. Liu received an MFA in Painting and Drawing from Pratt Institute (2012), a BFA Studio Art (2009) and a Psychology BA (2009) from The University of Texas at Austin. They were a resident at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (2013 and 2021), and a Pratt Forward resident (2024). Represented by Turley Gallery until its closure in 2026, with a two person show (2023), a solo show (2025), with work presentations in Upstate Art Weekend (2024),  Future Fair (2024), and the Dallas Art Fair (2025). @liukinche

“This lack is beyond anything which can represent it. It is only ever represented as a reflection on a veil” (Lacan, on desire as lack, (Seminar II, p.223))

My paintings explore chirality within recursive, mirrored structures that resist perfect overlap, using slippage, mutation, and asymmetry to examine perceptual instability, body dysmorphia, and the fractures produced when expectation meets lived experience. Drawing from psychoanalytic ideas of misrecognition and the mirror relation, the work approaches identity as something never fully coincident with its representation, where meaning emerges through continual translation across symbolic systems that both generate and limit legibility. Mirroring functions as a method for exploring interconnection and relationality, informed by an animist sensibility in which consciousness is distributed rather than contained within a singular self, and images operate as thresholds for alternate temporal, psychic, and mythological registers. Across dense compositions referencing mythology, embodied architectures, sacred objects, and fragments of visual culture, the work sustains a tension between coherence and excess. Rather than resolving this instability, the paintings remain in it, where distortion is treated as an unavoidable condition of perception and meaning persists through partial translation rather than completion.