Lucien Liu Photography
Projects
Archived
Since moving to San Francisco, I have become increasingly aware of the richness of the natural world woven into the city. I grew up in an environment where trees and dense vegetation were not such a constant presence, and I find myself continually fascinated by what nature offers within an urban landscape. A tree-lined street, a patch of fog, fallen leaves, or the distant suggestion of a forest can become a space of discovery, a place where the boundaries between the built environment and the natural world begin to dissolve.
Stasis: The Entangled Half Mile grows from this sense of encounter and wonder. The work looks closely at the fragments of nature that surround me, often within a small radius, and considers how these seemingly ordinary forms can become portals into another way of seeing and being. Leaves drift, branches intertwine, birds disappear into mist, and shifting light transforms familiar spaces into something uncertain and dreamlike.
The title Stasis refers not to absolute stillness, but to a moment suspended between movement and rest. Nature is always in transition. Leaves fall, branches sway, and seasons retreat and return. Even in apparent stillness, there is a quiet pulse beneath the surface. The entangled half mile describes both the physical space I move through and the web of relationships I encounter within it, a landscape where memory, perception, and the natural world become inseparable.
Through photography, I try to remain attentive to these subtle moments of transformation. What I once overlooked now feels alive with possibility. In the stillness of the city’s natural spaces, I find a reminder that movement does not always require distance. Sometimes it begins simply by pausing, looking, and allowing oneself to enter the flow of the world.
Light is the fundamental force that shapes photography, and recording its presence is at the center of One Day Solar. This project traces the movement and intensity of sunlight within a single day,, using extended exposures to make visible a continuous flow that normally escapes perception.
Working with pinhole cameras, I allowed light to accumulate on photosensitive material for hours at a time. Bright daytime sun creates dense bands and gradients, while the quieter light of dusk, night, and early morning registers as subtle tonal shifts. Rather than capturing single moments, these photographs function as records of duration—visual measurements of how light changes as the sun moves across the sky.
One Day Solar focuses on photography’s ability to translate time into form, presenting light not as an image of the world but as physical evidence of its passage.
Petrichor is a photographic meditation on existence. It is an attempt to trace the contours of the self through recurring visions: an untamed horse, the dome of a mottled palace marked by time, a silent sea stretching beyond comprehension, and a pathway that leads nowhere yet insists on being followed. These images return to me like fragments of a dream from which I have never fully awakened. By photographing them as they surface from memory and intuition, I confront the questions that have quietly accompanied me for years.
The title refers to the scent that rises from the earth after rain, a presence that is invisible yet unmistakable, born from the meeting of sky and soil. In a similar way, this project emerges from the meeting of time and the body, of memory and the present moment. The photographs inhabit a space where the remembered and the imagined become inseparable.
This work grew out of a prolonged uncertainty about growth and time. I wandered for years within the question “what am I,” aging before I fully understood what that aging meant. I came to realize that the tension between youth and adulthood is not simply about maturity, but about the instability of self-existence. We shed former versions of ourselves, yet they continue to linger within us.
Time does not answer the question of being; it only deepens it. The confusion of living within constant change cannot be resolved by waiting, but by turning inward and confronting the idea of “myself.” In Petrichor, the landscape becomes psychological terrain shaped by instinct, memory, silence, and direction without certainty. Together, these elements form not a conclusion, but a constellation of questions.
These images are what rise when time touches the self, ephemeral, elusive, and undeniably real.
* Prints from the Petrichor series were created using the Bromoil process.
Serenity is a photographic project that documents my personal discomfort with my own existence. By intentionally placing myself back into situations that once unsettled me, I chose to confront and re-experience the emotional shifts they provoked. Through this process, I observed subtle transformations that reflect fleeting psychological movements as they surfaced and dissolved. These transient states are rendered in static, ambiguous images, where clarity gives way to atmosphere. The photographs become traces of a passage from tension toward a fragile sense of relief.
I regard this project as a self-imposed experiment, a sequence of reactionary gestures born from deliberate actions. Although each photograph isolates a singular frozen instant, I believe life unfolds as a continuous current rather than as a series of fragments. Serenity attempts to reconcile this paradox. By revisiting moments of unease, I reconstruct the emotional continuity that connects them. In doing so, I create a space to confront discomfort not as an obstacle, but as a necessary path toward a more peaceful self.
In Eclipse, the photographic process is reduced to its essential components: light, chemistry, and time. By utilizing the Chemigram, the work bypasses the lens to interact directly with the physical surface of light-sensitive metirial.
The project explores a visual language of moon-phases, where the unpredictable reactions between resists and silver halides mimic the celestial shifts of the lunar cycle. Each piece is an alchemical record of a controlled struggle: the paper is layered with various resists, then repeatedly submerged in developer and fixer under open light. This process creates organic, cratered textures and luminous gradients that evoke the ethereal glow of an eclipse.
In Eclipse, the act of image-making becomes a ritual of listening to light. These images are not windows through experience but echoes of experience, inviting reflection on perception, fragility, and the luminous choreography between chance and intention.