In our museum world, there is a never-ending debate about the boundaries of “folk art” and “contemporary art.” For instance, one artist’s website asserts that “traditional art represents the historical culture and traditions of the past, while contemporary art reflects the ideas and technologies of the present-day world.” Difference.Wiki maintains that traditional art “roots itself firmly within established norms, techniques, and themes,” while contemporary art “confidently steps beyond convention, immersing itself in a dialogue with societal shifts, technological advances, and cultural fluidity.”

Folklorists, including many of us at the Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, often resist such distinctions. We seek to demonstrate how folk artists and other exemplars of folk culture regularly engage with social and political issues in ways that are not only traditional but also progressive and current.

One of the Center’s former interns, Lucy XC Liu, originally from Beijing, is actively working to bridge the gap between traditional and contemporary art through diverse cultural expressions in visual art, poetry, music, and theater. Since 2019, when Liu interned with the Center while an undergraduate student at Smith College in Massachusetts, she has studied at the Sorbonne in Paris, received the prestigious Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant and reviews in mainstream media including China Daily and People’s Daily. She is currently pursuing an MA at University College London’s Slade School of Fine Art.

While at the Center, Liu wrote for Folklife Magazine about how Chinese Kunqu opera includes timeless themes about humanity that are universally resonant today, and how the traditions associated with Kunqu are passed on within communities. During the years since, Liu and I have regularly corresponded and met several times via Zoom. In this excerpted Q&A from our conversations, she shares insights from her internship and her artistic practice.

How have your artistic goals evolved since your internship?

As a contemporary artist and writer, I see myself as a “culture mechanic” mending the ruptures between the past and the present, the East and the West. I seek continuity in my culture, which has suffered centuries of traumatic disruption and turmoil. I aim to reconcile Chinese art-historical narratives with the world through initiating global conversations.

My internship at the Center was a dazzling experience. As part of the Folklife team, I assisted practitioners of various types of cultural heritage from Beijing, Tibet, Bhutan, and Armenia. I learned that protecting ancient art forms and traditions involves shifting social structures through collaborating with multiple stakeholders and reaching out to different audiences.

You began studying and performing Chinese Kunqu opera as a teen. What is your relationship to it now?

My international education in literature and contemporary art gives me a unique perspective among Kunqu practitioners who specialize in performing. I am an ideator and communicator who sees Kunqu as much more than performing: it is a complicated folk practice that involves literature, music, dance, theater, historical dialogues, and more. I attempt to address everyone interested in these realms of knowledge and to highlight progressive themes such as human will and feminism. Many crucial artistic and literary threads come together in my works.

Partly inspired by my internship at Smithsonian Folklife four years ago, I have pushed creative boundaries with my art exhibitions, writings, and lectures, and I hope to become a versatile cultural mediator. I have been trying to place Kunqu in broader artistic and literary dialogues today, to trigger new discussions about this traditional art form, and to make performances relevant to a world audience and to the frameworks of contemporary thought.

And you have incorporated Kunqu into other art forms—how so?

My research-based solo exhibition, The Dream that Flocks South in Shanghai in 2021, discusses a universal question: the complicated power dynamics that come into play within sociopolitical oppression, and disillusionment toward the erasure of culture in this process.

For this artwork, I handmade 1,000 square feet of paper from the Qing dynasty-banned novel The Dream of the Red Chamber, written in the mid-eighteenth century. I reference the line “The land is cleansed by snowfall” from this book, by covering the floor with large sheets, and suspending dreamy paper constructions from the ceiling. On the exhibition opening, I invited the audience to tread into the work, tearing and soiling it.

In the sculpture, a male partner and I did a performance of the Kunqu opera love story The Peony Pavilion (1598), which is an important reference in The Dream of the Red Chamber. Involving the complicity of the public, my artwork depicts a Chinese literati’s shattered dream of romance as metaphorical to the sociopolitical destruction and erasure of culture.

I have continued to address Kunqu in broader humanities dialogues in recent years. In May 2023, I was invited to design a performance at the Rockbund Art Museum in Shanghai, after which I gave a lecture, “Resorting to dreams—Love and Political Disillusionment in The Peony Pavilion and The Dream of the Red Chamber.” Members of the Chinese literati, like Tang Xianzu and Cao Xueqin, escaped into dreams of love and eroticism, as an escape of despair at the real world under the confinements of Ming and Qing societal doctrine and sociopolitical violence.

How does your practice bridge concepts of “folk art” and “contemporary art”?

I want my cultural practice to be “prismatic.” Kunqu refracts through my work into many intriguing topics concerning humanity and engaging in essential global dialogues in the arts and humanities. Having studied in four countries, I strongly feel that great art about the human condition is universal, and artistic treasures from cultures underrepresented in the Western canon should have the world stage.

With my works like The Dream that Flocks South, I attempt to give new life to traditional art forms, which has been an important part of my practice that cogently illustrates my growth and development since my time as a Center intern in 2019. Cultural heritage remains relevant and vital to many debates of our own time.

Lucy XC Liu is a multidisciplinary artist, writer, and Kunqu practitioner and a former intern at the Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage. She has had multiple solo and group exhibitions in China, Greece, Italy, United Kingdom, and the United States. She is drawn to the notion of healing on personal and societal levels and explores the multifaceted truths of historical trauma through individual testimonies of hunger and desire. She believes that the magic of art and literature sparks at points of spiritual contact and sutures the crevices within her culture and between cultures.

James Deutsch is a curator at the Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage who has visited China many times: as co-curator for the 2007 Smithsonian Folklife Festival program Mekong River: Connecting Cultures; as co-curator for the 2014 Festival program China: Tradition and the Art of Living; and as one of the coordinators for a 2015 tour of U.S. musicians in China.