Moving in Circles: Interview with Liza Lou

Tactile and visual; muted but resonate; minimal yet expressive—Liza Lou’s works often encompass attributes that should be antithetical but instead are folded within one another. Based in Los Angeles, Lou has been working with beads for more than 30 years. She initially became known for her room-sized installation The Kitchen (1991–96), for which she spent five solitary years covering an entire American middle-class kitchen in a beaded simulacrum of itself. It debuted at the New Museum in New York and launched her career in working with beads. Most recently, she spent more than a decade in Durban, in the South African province of KwaZulu-Natal, working with a studio of Zulu artisans to produce intricate and ambitious installations. 

In Seoul for the opening of her exhibition “The River and the Raft” at Lehmann Maupin gallery and Songwon Art Center, Lou gave me a tour of her latest works, many of which are painted abstractions layered on top of sheets of white beads. To a background soundtrack of harmonizing ahhhhhs from a video of herself drawing repetitious circles in black ink, we talked about the evolution of her practice from the years of The Kitchen—which is about to go on view again for the first time in 20 years at New York’s Whitney Museum of Art—to her recent work in a collaborative studio, and her more meditative abstractions. 

What came to you first: the shape of the circle or the material of the bead? 

The circle, for humans, is a very central idea—a universal symbol. So I suppose as a human being, the circle came first. As an artist: I would say the beads came first, but how can you separate the two? It’s only ever coming out of yourself.

What is the process behind a canvas like Afternoons (2019), which is made of beads? 

They are made one at a time, beginning with the glass beads and thread—so unlike my earlier works they are not covered in a fabric, they are the fabric. I commission them from my studio team in South Africa. 

One thing that really fascinates me about working in communities is the idea that the hand does something—it makes a painting—just by virtue of holding something for a long time. It creates these streaks and lines; it is a kind of painting coming through from the body, with the oil of the hand staining the thread, and then that thread shows through the glass beads. That caused me to ask questions about painting, so then I started painting on the surface of others. 

In Unminding Cloud (2019), there’s this really subtle line of red thread. For me, to draw attention to how something is made is always a real interest, because it really is the work—it is not something separate for me. Process is not a means to an end; it is the work, and then you have this relic.

Many of the works have an element of destruction to them, which reveals a painting behind the beads.  

For Psalm 51 (2019), I was thinking about the idea of mercy and resuscitation, and how the broken quality of it makes it more beautiful than when it was pristine. There is a painting underneath, and I’m cutting into it. This picture really carves into the question of the difference between painting on glass and painting on a canvas. The answer is that you can’t cut into paint in the same way, but you can carve into glass. So I’m smashing off the beads and then revealing the painting that’s underneath. And there’s something about that inequality—hiding something that you’ve labored over and like—that is interesting to me. 

That’s been a longstanding interest in my work, because you can never know it—no matter what picture of mine you are looking at. You can never fully memorize it, never remember that there’s one thread that’s a little off-kilter, because it comprises millions of millions of units. 

What is the process of composing a large work like Sunday Morning (2019), which combines a lot of different elements, from painting on top of the beaded sheets to smashing them in order to reveal the painting underneath?

I worked on this on the wall of my studio, painting and taking parts away and then putting them back. I then arrived at the composition. I didn’t know how large it was going to be for a long time. I keep wrestling with it. When I finally resolved the scale of it, I mounted it on canvas.

I tried to think about this picture as being about a certain kind of joy. We’re really living in such tumultuous times, and more than ever I really want to make work that talks about beauty and a kind of repose that I think is missing in our daily lives, in our daily visual landscape. We’re constantly exposed to visual horror and that makes me really committed to beauty in a way that I’ve always been—but even more so just because I think it’s important to have a sense of repose. 

That actually becomes political in an interesting way. It’s not a passive thing; it’s not a decorative thing—it’s actually necessary. There’s a part of the Wallace Stevens poem “Sunday Morning” (1923) that really gets to me. It illustrates the sharpness of being alive and being awake, asking questions about god, about religion, about death—that’s what I mean when I talk about beauty. I don’t mean insensate, stupid, meaningless, or decorative. I mean moments that you have in your life where you think: “It’s worth it to work really hard for the thing you love,” or “The struggle to make art is worthwhile.” That’s what I was really asking myself as I was working on this body of work in the studio. Because it’s really difficult to feel that anything we do is meaningful because we are just assaulted the whole time.

There’s something inherently hopeful in the act of making art, even if the artist is talking about something painful or dystopic. Because it assumes that you can work on something that has no function other than to talk about ideas. It’s an interesting way to spend your time.

How did you start working with glass beads? 

Funnily enough, I just walked into a bead store—even though I wasn’t someone who liked craft. In fact, I’m a bit of bungler. When I was child and someone would try to teach me to sew, I hated it. I hated being told what to do. I hated things that were precise. I was kind of slob, in that way. So I loved to paint and draw. I always wanted to be an artist. Since I was five, I knew that was what I wanted to do. The first sculptor I loved as a child was George Segal. I always thought that I wanted to make something room-sized. But the last thing I would have ever thought about was craft. 

I guess I was old enough, and mature enough, as an artist to understand that material can be political. And that material can actually disturb something and make a statement. So I had an immediate reaction [to the beads], which had to do with what they looked like: their incredible color, luminosity, and sparkle. They were super interesting visually, but also held the whole history of thinking about women’s work and a kind of prerogative idea of beauty. 

What led you to the idea of covering an entire kitchen in beads? 

I saw the material, and within a short period of time I realized I wanted to make a kitchen. I had started by making food objects. The first thing I made was a soup can. I was thinking about slowing down Pop Art by putting beads with tweezers on a string. It was the opposite of Pop Art—the slowest thing in the world—and yet it had this dazzle and this promise of advertisement: sparkling, brand-new, better-than-ever kind of quality.

It was the early 1990s, and feminism was very shrill. There was a lot of rage, very justifiable rage. A lot of work was very overtly political at the time. My idea was that feminism could be a little more subtle and also funny, because there was kind of lack of humor in the early days of feminist art—as in any political movement, because you’re fighting and the stakes are so high. And they still are, but the conversation has changed. So for me, in the ’90s, beads were a way to talk about the domestic sphere, anything feminine, and other taboo subjects. “Feminism” was kind of a dirty word; craft was certainly forbidden. You needed to make art with a capital A. 

This simple question has taken me the better part of 30 years to dig into and think about. The idea of a circle or something with a hole in it—it’s the most simple [form], and it dates back to pre-civilization. The idea of taking something and knocking a hole in it and then putting thread in it, it’s incredibly primal. 

What took you to Durban (KwaZulu-Natal)? 

I had this idea in 2005 to make a cage; I wanted to make a sculpture of a security fence. I also wondered what it would be like to work with women who had a predisposition to the material, in a way that might be part of their growing up. I cast around different places in the world, and wrote some letters, and ended up in Durban because the Zulu beadwork is considered among the best in the world, and at the same time there was tremendous need for work, and I felt like I could make a difference at the same time that I could work with highly skilled people. 

There was something about this incredible collaboration with women who really understand beads. I came in with a completely different way of working. Not only was I a foreigner, I was rendering their material foreign to them. After being there for two weeks, I felt glued to the spot. I felt like I had found my life’s purpose, working with women who had this talent. It was this tiny material that related to other cultures around the world, which I didn’t even appreciate or fully apprehend at the time I started working with it. So by asking questions about labor, and how to make work, that really opened up my practice.

You’ve created all kinds of things in beads, from an entire grass backyard to tree-trunks, and now you’re making these very atmospheric abstractions. What do you think they share?

Every time I finish a body of work, I’m done with it. I’m onto the next body of work. I don’t do it intentionally. I’ve just exhausted it and I’m onto something else. 

But I think I always want to get to something really essential. I am still always looking for that: the essence of something. The essence of weaving—what is that? It’s happening through the hand, through the body. Everything we ever make is only ever coming through the body. It’s not really an accident that I have small hands and that I have an affinity to something small, or a dexterity that comes through my physical self. So then to work with other people who have a similar dexterity but totally different hands, it comes though their body in a totally different way. 

This body of work is really about seeing at what point after I destroy it, after you go back and try to restore it—what is the tipping point, when something is torn to bits but is more beautiful than if it were pristine. That is the other side of preservation, preserving our handicraft, as it were.

What did you learn about working collaboratively with the women in KwaZulu-Natal?

With beads, I realized the material that I was working with has a cultural resonance around the world. I can’t even begin to describe the joy of working in a community that loves the material as much as I do.

There’s something special about the work we do together. There’s a weird anonymity to all labor-intensive practices, which you could even say about The Kitchen, which I made all by myself. But as a culture at large, we don’t appreciate labor on any level. We walk across carpets with muddy feet—carpets that were made by people in India who really loved and cared for making that and took real pride it making it. Everything we touch is made by someone, even this table, this floor. After The Kitchen, I worked with a community in LA, on the blades of grass for Back Yard, all these different groups. Weirdly, people thought it was fun. There was a sense of joy to it.

Labor doesn’t necessarily mean drudgery. It can mean love, care, it can mean attending to something very small, doing the best you can, improving upon something, through your own body. When my studio team sees what we are doing all together, en masse, it is an incredible revelation that we all have. One of us can make a cloth, and that’s one thing. But when all of us collectively make them it is astonishing. There is a discovery that I make together with the women that I work with that surprises all of us.