Bio
Caroline Niu (b. 2003, Shanghai, China) is an interdisciplinary artist and animator living and working between Toronto and New York. Her practice weaves together painting, moving image, and sculpture to explore the subtle boundaries between movement and stillness, the organic and the inanimate, blur and focus—centering on a poetics of fluidity. Caroline received her BA in Art History and Visual Art from Columbia University in 2025. She was an emerging artist-in-residence at the Yale Norfolk School of Art (2024), and has recently exhibited in a duo show at the Barnard Movement Lab and group exhibition at the LeRoy Neiman Gallery in New York.
Artist Statement
Caroline's practice in animation provides her with a distinctive perspective on motion and its relationship with time, particularly through the concept of in-betweens—the transitional frames that exist between keyframes in animation. Conventionally understood as technical elements that smooth motion and create fluid movement, these in-between spaces become conceptual terrain in her multidisciplinary practice.
As a time-based medium, animation embeds a form of becoming within every frame -- each moment contains both the anticipation of future evolution and the memory of what preceded it, creating a preemptive envisioning of transformation that exists even when a single frame is viewed in isolation. The extended, repetitive production cycle of frame-by-frame animation demands equal attention to every gesture within a movement, regardless of its perceived importance. Even those distorted, abstracted, liminal in-between spaces that the eye can barely register in a complete sequence must be rendered with the same meticulous care. This intimate knowledge of how incremental changes create coherent motion draws Caroline to explore the in-between as sites for exploring subtle boundaries between living and dead, organism and object.
Working across various media—painting, animation, sculpture, and video installation—Caroline translates the animator's understanding of temporal transition into works that inhabit states of flux. Through feathery brushstrokes that create scenes of varying transparency, opacity, and recognizability, her work captures moments that dwell in the gaps of perception with a poetic and playful fluidity.