by Chunbum Park
Xinyu Liu, a multidexterous artist engaging with a variety of media, exhibits her work in a solo presentation at Art Cake in Brooklyn, titled, “Fool’s Hour.” Liu conceives of her body of work as revolving around the experience of a person going to an amusement park or a casino, where the busy sense of time within a 9 to 5 work schedule is lost. What makes someone a fool, and what is the meaning behind the title, ‘fool’s hour?’ Liu is catching on the subtle difference between how we label ourselves and others, as winners and losers, as rich or poor, and as a fool and non-fool. There are many contradictory considerations and occurrences that go into deciding how someone might be a fool. For example, the exorbitant use of money might make someone a fool because s/he or they are wasting their financial resources, yet such a use might also count as a sign of wealth and thereby not foolish. Power relations are reversible, depending on the context and the signifying traits.
In “Fool’s Hour” (2025), we see a circular structure encasing segments of a rollercoaster ride, made in transparent acrylic. Numbers flip between 6 and 9, and a clown’s hat with three arms carries spherical tips on two of the arms but not the third one. What the work shows is a contained sense of time, in which time ceases to go forward linearly but condenses into a cyclical form. This is the Fool’s Hour, in which the subject is free to be a fool of the capitalist system that wants to extract as much money from the subject as possible.
“Time is not lost, it is freed” (2025) is a wood-carved sculpture in the form of some kind of casing for a glasses or pen, a jewelry box, or a miniature burial vault. The phrase looks like an old proverb, but it is a reaction to Benjamin Franklin’s belief that “lost time is never found again.” What we must conclude from this train of logic is that time is not lost, but it must be freed and wrestled away through a match or struggle with the capitalist system that seeks to deprive us of time. This is the question that each and every person living within the reality of a capitalist world must deal with. To be a fool or not to be, that is the question.
Xinyu Liu: Fool’s Hour on April 17-May 10, 2026 at Artcake, 214 40th Street, Brooklyn, NY 11232