Zihan Liu

About

Zihan Liu is a city design researcher and spatial practitioner from China, currently studying at the Royal College of Art. Her work investigates the intersection of migrant labor, border regimes, and everyday urban infrastructures, with a particular focus on domestic workers’ lived experiences. Drawing from design, archival methods, and narrative cartography, she explores how invisible labor shapes—and is shaped by—the city. Her projects often embed micro-interventions and care-based strategies into ordinary spaces, reimagining support systems within hostile urban environments.

Blending field research with speculative design, Liu constructs counter-narratives through diagrams, timelines, installation, and narrative mapping. Her recent projects investigate how domestic workers’ daily routes—often fragmented, monitored, and confined—can become sites for micro-interventions. These include street-level disruptions such as disguised help points, self-initiated communication systems, and reimagined support services embedded in everyday commercial façades. Her work often takes the form of fictional yet plausible spatial proposals, legal fictions, and encoded visual systems that open possibilities for collective care, subversion, and solidarity.

Alongside spatial strategies, Liu’s practice engages with media studies, particularly the materiality of memory, decay, and time. She experiments with cyanotypes, soil burial, seed paper, and sound recordings to reflect on cycles of labor, life, and disappearance.

Rooted in both rigorous research and imaginative design, Liu’s work seeks to make visible the support systems that sustain marginalized lives, while questioning the hostile architectures—both physical and bureaucratic—that govern access to space, time, and justice.