Caroline Niu
Animation
The AlphabetOrganic Machine
Painting
Organizing ChaosOne more wish before bed
Experiments
Digital
Illustration
Bio
aboutcv
Bio
Caroline Niu (b. 2003, Shanghai, China) is a New York-based artist currently completing her BA in Art History and Visual Art at Columbia University. Besides her independent painting practice, she works as a freelance animator and illustrator. This interdisciplinary interest is evident in her art, which seamlessly merges photo collage, moving image, and painting to convey a poetic and playful fluidity. Her achievements include distinction from RISD Pre-College, the Scholastic Golden Award in Illustration, and participation in the Yale Norfolk Summer School of Art in 2024.
Artist Statement
I animate and paint moments of small magic—not to save the world or fight villains, but to spark a private, subtle smile. A cat turning into a girl’s cavity, a flower struck by rain, your distorted face in the glass bottle. My subjects don't speak --- the animals, plants, and forgotten objects in my work communicate through simply being. Their silence isn't emptiness but another kind of language, something more universal --- a visual language that needs no translation.
Having grown up in Shanghai, lived in Toronto, and now studying in the United States, I've felt how formal language can become a barrier instead of a bridge --- we follow rigid grammatical rules to be understood, as if conversation were a test we must pass perfectly or not at all. Through animation, I search for something more fundamental—a visual vocabulary that requires no dictionary, no cultural roadmap. Like how we understand a cat's purr or the tilt of its head.
My work lives in these in-between spaces—between stillness and motion, between cultures, between what we say and what we feel. It's a reminder that before we had grammar or nations, we knew how to speak through presence.