Exhibition: Natural Order, Lucien Liu and Rachel Phillips

Image by Rachel Phillips Exhibition: Natural Order Lucien Liu and Rachel Phillips Opening Reception and Walk-Through: October 17, 4:00 - 6:00pm Exhibition on View: October 17 - November 29, 2026 Lucien Liu and Rachel Phillips both spend time in the weeds, looking closely at the cacophonous cycles of natural growth pushing through the cracks of so-called civilized life. Natural Order centers on a shared motif of spiders and spiderwebs that weave literally and metaphorically through both artists’ work. Webs offer up complex metaphors: while arrestingly beautiful, their evolutionary purpose is nevertheless entrapment. Natural Order maps this tension through our natural and unnatural Northern California coastal environs. Moving to San Francisco in 2016 from the Inner Mongolia region of China, Lucien began a routine of long picture-making walks through Golden Gate Park, a nature dramatically different from what he’d known in the arid, high desert of Mongolia. Turning his gaze from the intimacy of a dappled leaf to the churning expanse of the Pacific ocean, he poetically catalogues the accumulation of elements that make and remake this leafy oasis—an artificial landscape forged by humans from sand dunes as their city grid expanded in the 19th century, a wildly natural and yet fundamentally unnatural place. In the twentieth century, the web was appropriated to describe the most ubiquitous technology of our lives—the world wide web—an omnipresent sixth element that ensnares us daily in its inorganic fibers. Presenting work from a new series Not a Cloud in the Sky, Rachel culls digital images of clouds suspended above the windowless data centers powering today’s cloud computing and artificial intelligence fever dreams. These sky pictures serve as the basis for monoprints made outdoors directly from spiderwebs in a “pinch me, I’m real” reminder that the natural world undergirds even our most seemingly immaterial technologies. Lucien Liu Lucien Liu is a Chinese visual artist who employs photography as his primary medium. His monochrome images offer tranquil meditations on landscapes, reflecting his perception of self-sustaining existence and the relentless passage of time. Each photograph is meticulously hand-printed using a blend of historical and contemporary photographic techniques that nod to the tradition of black and white photography. Lucien shows with Chung24 Gallery in San Francisco, and in addition to his artistic practice, is Curator at the Gallery at Leica Store San Francisco. lucienliu.com Rachel Phillips Rachel Phillips began photography while completing her undergraduate degree at Skidmore College. More of a printer than shutterbug, Rachel frequently reworks photographs she has variously collected using myriad experimental techniques and unusual materials. Her most recent solo exhibition Not a Cloud in the Sky was presented by Catherine Couturier Gallery earlier this year, and a new handmade artists’ book Lovelace about the origins of...