Patricia Chen-Wei Liu (Patty to some, Chen-Wei to others, depending on when and where you came into her life) was a filmmaker, musician, cinematographer, and artist whose creative range was extraordinary. She moved through the world with an analytical mind and the soul of a born storyteller, and she used both, constantly, in ways that surprised everyone around her.
Her education rooted her deeply in experimental music and technology. She studied at Cogswell College, learning audio engineering and digital signal processing, building the circuits that shaped sound. She then studied at Mills College, where she worked with pioneering composers Pauline Oliveros and Alvin Curran. Her Mills thesis concert, excerpts from living adjacent, was performed at the East Bay Creative Music Festival in Oakland in 1998. She made electronic music for dance troupes, performed with the band Neung Phak at the Great American Music Hall in San Francisco, and played in the electronic ensemble Rajar. She played violin. She brought a musician's ear to everything she made.
Film became her primary language. She was accepted into UCLA's MFA directing program, one of the most prestigious in the world, where her work earned top awards and scholarships. Her films were, in the words of one close friend, "visceral, hard-hitting expressions of her deepest feelings about life." She had very strong opinions about her art and could be stubborn as hell about them. That was not a flaw. Her films span twenty years: Leila (her first), Unborn (2006), Channels of Recognition (2010), Don't Break the Circle (2012), LA Lens on Sacred Music: Chirgilchin (a documentary portrait), Re:Vision, Aqueduct, Radiation (2015), and Trees for Rosa (2020). She also worked at the Sundance Film Festival, and before film school produced educational technology at Leapfrog, helping design the Math TurboTwist. For about a year she worked on a then-secret Google project called Ingress, writing difficult puzzles and cryptic clues that drew on every skill she had: mathematics, audio, photography, film. The technology became the foundation for Pokémon Go.
Patty made things with her hands. She renovated five houses, doing all the calculations herself, choosing every color and fixture with precision. She knitted sweaters. She built furniture. Her home was filled with objects she had made. She created a life full of beauty and meaning, and she brought beauty and meaning to the lives of everyone around her.
In 2005, at 33, she was diagnosed with breast cancer. She faced it the way she faced everything: with humor, with determination, with her head up. She fought the disease hard and came through it cancer-free. In 2009 the cancer returned as stage 4. She kept working. She finished her Masters degree. She kept creating, kept showing up, kept being Patty: optimistic and hopeful until the very end.
She is missed every single day. She lives on in the films she made, the people she inspired, and the love she gave so freely and without reservation.