ART ANTWERP KÉVIN BRAY + JEN LIU
Booth 20
During Art Antwerp 2025, Upstream Gallery presents a duo exhibition of Kévin Bray (FR, 1989) and Jen Liu (USA, 1976).
Both artists employ a visual language rooted in Surrealism, while remaining strongly connected to the present. Working with diverse materials and in a collage-like manner, they both use fragmented bodies and cartoonish elements, heavily influenced by digital image culture. Beneath this playful surface, Bray and Liu probe the darker sides of digitalisation’s impact on human beings, the body, and society.
Jen Liu is a visual artist based in New York, working in video, choreographic performance, biomaterial, and painting to explore topics of national identity, gendered economies, neoliberal industrial labor, and the re-motivating of archival artifacts.
Jen Liu’s works on paper from the Electropore series shimmer in gold and pink. Body parts and objects emerge from cartoonish holes: graphic designs of severed fingers pressing buttons, female figures entangled in cords. Although lighthearted at first glance, the works speak of entrapment within closed structures and allude to the people hidden behind the glossy surface of new technologies. In her practice, Liu focuses on the often-invisible labour of female factory workers in the Global South. In Electropore, she shows how bodies become ensnared in systems of repetitive labour and minimal autonomy. In doing so, Liu makes visible how exploitation and production intertwine, and how the worker herself becomes part of a capitalist machine.
She is a 2019 recipient of the Creative Capital Award, 2018 LACMA Art + Technology Lab grant, and 2017 Guggenheim Fellowship in Film/ Video, 2017 NYSCA/NYFA Fellowship in Digital/ Electronic Art.
Liu has presented work at The Whitney Museum, MoMA, and The New Museum, New York; Royal Academy and ICA in London; Kunsthaus Zurich; Kunsthalle Wien; the Aspen Museum of Art; Henry Art Gallery, Seattle; MUSAC, Leon; as well as the 2014 Shanghai Biennale and UCCA Beijing.
She has received multiple grants and residencies, including Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart, Germany; Sommerakademie, Bern, Switzerland; de ateliers, Amsterdam, NL; and the PollockKrasner Foundation, New York, among others. In 2016 she was a resident artist at Para Site in Hong Kong and LMCC Process Space on Roosevelt Island, in 2018-19 she was a resident artist at Pioneer Works, Brooklyn, and in 2019 she was a Swatch Artist in Residence in Shanghai.
Jen Liu
Sticky ideas, 2022 Gesso, acrylic ink, acrylic gouache, and handmade acrylic metallic paint on paper 178 x 130.5 cm
Kévin Bray is a French interdisciplinary artist based in Amsterdam whose practice moves fluidly between the physical and the digital. Bray investigates how the visual languages of software, images, and materials can be stretched, hybridized, and transformed.
Kévin Bray’s hybrid, 3D-printed sculptures are physical manifestations of digitally created figures that regularly appear in his videos or paintings. To these physical sculptures, he adds found objects and paint, giving each work authentic qualities and turning it into a unique object. These figures thus travel through both digital and physical environments, recalling the interconnected and complementary processes they embody. The sculptures demonstrate that digital and physical layers form part of the same reality, constantly in dialogue with one another—both in Bray’s work and in society at large, where social media and algorithms profoundly shape our “physical” lives.
Bray’s solo exhibitions include The Collective Shadow, Upstream Gallery, 2023; The Transformation of Matter Creates Light, Trauma Bar und Kino, Berlin, 2022; Wills, Wheels, Wells, Future Gallery, Berlin, 2021; Breakdown After Before, Dordrecht Museum, Dordrecht, The Netherlands, 2021; Don’t forgive/get, them, Stigter Van Doesberg, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, 2020; and Morpher III, Foam Amsterdam, The Netherlands, 2020.
His work was also shown in group exhibitions, including Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Palais DeTokyo, Paris; Max Ernst Museum, Brühl; Schiphol Airport, Amsterdam; and RijksOpen, Amsterdam.
Kévin Bray It Is Holding On, 2025
3D printed PLA, glass, ceramics 63 x 33 x 20 cm Unique
It Is Holding On, 2025
3D printed PLA, glass, ceramics
63 x 33 x 20 cm Unique
Kévin Bray
Looking Back, Becoming Children
3D printed PLA, metal, second life objects
60 x 31 x 22 cm
Unique
Kévin Bray
Kévin Bray
Still Intrigued, 2025
3D printed PLA, glass, ceramics, second life objects
61 x 37 x 26 cm Unique
They Travel, 2025
3D printed PLA, glass, ceramics, metal, second life objects
63 x 60 x 24 cm
Unique
Kévin Bray
Jen Liu
Labour Cloud, 2022
Gesso, acrylic ink, acrylic gouache, and handmade acrylic metallic paint on paper
178 x 130.5 cm
Jen Liu
Sticky ideas, 2022
Gesso, acrylic ink, acrylic gouache, and handmade acrylic metallic paint on paper
178 x 130.5 cm
Jen Liu
Nothing of that time remains but an occasional shifting shadow, 2022
Gesso, acrylic ink, acrylic gouache, and handmade acrylic metallic paint on paper
88.5 x 59.25 cm
