Bang-Yao Liu: Animated Hero
Published 17 months ago
Taiwanese animation artist who made the short film Deadline
- Text by William Oliver
Bang-yao Liu is a Taiwanese graduate student whose colourful stop-frame animations are created from everyday household objects that he finds in shops and markets. Born in Hsinchu city and currently studying in Taipei, his work started to get noticed after he made the short film Deadline. The film, which showed Bang-yao sitting at his desk in front of an animated wall of moving environments depicted in pink and blue post-it notes, took the artist four sleepless days to make, and went on to become a web viral hit.
He creates work that is often spontaneously inspired, a recent film involved animating an evolving city made from multi-coloured plastic objects, for example, was inspired by Liu’s first trip to Shanghai, with all the objects making up the model city being sourced in local markets and shops. Describing the metropolis as being “like a 20-year-old man, evolving and with plenty of opportunity” the resulting piece witnesses Shanghai's landmarks mapped out using buckets, bins, trays, cutlery, kitchen implements and doormats. At the base of the artists work is an ambition to make the viewer take notice of normally undervalued objects, and realise what their hidden potential. “With my art pieces I want to inspire more people to take a look at the small things around them,” he explains. “I want them to imagine more, and to try more”.
Celebrating a year of creativity Converse presents a series of their
favourite new artists from around the world. Find out more about how to
enter the Converse/DAZED 2010 Emerging Artists Award
