Amy Liu

Harper’s is pleased to present Pearled Chiaroscuro, New York artist Amy Liu’s first solo presentation with the gallery, featuring six new oil paintings on canvas.

Liu’s paintings feature opulent colors and elaborate ornamentation, focusing on the beauty of personal adornment and how identity is constructed through luxury fashion. Chiaroscuro, Italian for “light-dark,” describes the strong contrasts of light and shadow that give these paintings their depth and allure. The exhibition’s title also references the natural formation of a pearl: When an irritant becomes lodged within an oyster’s tissue, it can be gradually enveloped in successive mineral layers, transforming an intrusive process into something luminous. Liu’s painstaking painterly practice calls to mind a similar transformation. Drawing from Old Masters techniques, she begins with precise drawings and tonal underpaintings and builds color through glazing, applying transparent layers of paint to create depth and richness.

In spirit, these paintings hold the splendor of a night at the opera, as Liu’s background as a trained soprano informs the careful staging of her work. Figures are abstracted and their identities deliberately concealed, as if supporting the ornamentation rather than the other way around. A cloth’s elaborate drape, which might occupy the corner of a Bronzino portrait, here stands at the foreground in Cuore di Giada, enclosing a pearlescent ear that becomes a setting for an emerald earring. A singer needs a stage to perform, much like an earring needs an ear to become jewelry.

Liu’s technical mastery turns the painted canvas into a luxury object of its own, while the dazzling imagery conceals the surreal subtext of her silent, anonymous subjects. Bedecked in glitzing gems and gold chains, these figures remain hidden from the viewer, communicating instead through their jewelry and fabrics. What we wear can allow us to blend into our surroundings as much as it can distinguish us from others, making adornment both an expression and a concealment of identity. Liu’s surreal abstraction places what might be minor details on the neck or wrist of an Ingres portrait at the center of the picture.

Amy Liu (b. 1997, Guangzhou, China) received a BA from Stony Brook University in 2019 and an MFA from New York Academy of Art in 2022. Liu’s work has been the subject of solo presentations at Latitude Gallery, New York (2025); and Village One Gallery, New York (2022). Most recently, her work has been exhibited at Marinaro Gallery, New York (2026); Roq La Rue Gallery, Seattle (2026); Harper’s, New York (2025); and Wilkinson Gallery, New York (2024 and 2023). She has also participated in Art SG, Singapore (2026), and Untitled Art, Miami Beach (2025), both with Harper’s. Her work has appeared in New American Paintings. Liu lives and works in New York City.