After receiving a BA in journalism concentrating in broadcasting and photography in 1989, Arthur Liou worked for several years as a producer of education video in the military and a photojournalist in China Television Company, Taiwan. He started pursuing his interest in art and came to U.S. in 1994. Currently studying in the MFA program at the University of Florida, he teaches various photography courses as TA and dreams about scuba diving everyday.

However, the task for me to represent my work is not only to find out the different paths taken, instead I need to trace the similarity persists among them to grasp my essential mind setting. In searching for that, I found a general interest in “sign,” which can be read literally as a physical object or as broad as a system that generates meaning. For instance, in the earliest Cedar Key project not only signs and symbols are often being represented as cultural metaphors, but the use of plastic camera is also a research on the methodology of mediating signs and meanings. The use of signs from the web sites in the project “Gen” is another attempt to link culture references through this system in both the messages being communicated by the signs and the mechanism which produces those messages. Until recently, the signs had surfaced to be the main focus in the installation “Excavating the Ruins,” in which the signs take on an equivalence of institutional framing, and its function of legitimizing context is held under scrutiny.

Following this analysis, these works represent an interest in the human act (artistic, scientific, utilitarian) of making marks and interpreting marks, namely, the process of coding and decoding. It is a concept that could draw me back to my early study in communication theory. I am interested in developing the knowledge to look at it in relation to the semiology and the visual representation. Especially in the world that floods with duplications and puzzles about the authenticity, what does the sign tell us? Does it provide us with truth, information, social control, culture context, or all of the above? And by whom? How? These are the issues I would like to explore in the future.