Yutian Liu is an artist from Beijing and now studying in Chicago. She plays with signs and shapes. In doing so, she focuses on locations of power in discourse, language, and knowledge construction in relation to people’s cognition. She calls her gesture “offsetting,” a term she mobilizes differently from the technical printing term. It refers not only to the way the shapes appear but also the way they are evidence of a slight distance from an original reality. The resulting work is in the form of imagery and graphics made with fiber, printmedia, painting and collage. By employing humor or nonsense, she questions how a symbol is created, how we see things, how we make meaning, how we identify symbols as things and vice versa. Yutian received a BFA in Printmaking from China Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA) in 2019.