Liú Bólín 刘勃麟 / 劉勃麟

Chinese, b. 1973

BiographyLiu Bolin (Liu Po-Lin; Liú Bólín 刘勃麟 / 劉勃麟) was born in Binzhou, Shandong Province in 1973. Despite the artistic gift he showed at an early age, he was unable to pursue formal artistic training before college due to his family’s financial circumstances. After graduating from Shandong College of Arts with a bachelor’s degree in 1995, he was appointed as a teacher at the Department of Art at Binzhou University. In 1998, Liu held his first solo exhibition in Yantai, Shandong Province. Aspiring to be a professional artist, he moved to Beijing in 1999 and became a student of Sui Jianguo (Suì Jiànguó 隋建国 / 隋建國), a contemporary Chinese artist who was also a professor at the Department of Sculpture in the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing. In 2001, Liu earned his Master of Fine Arts degree there. Four years later, he began to work as an assistant in Sui’s studio located at Suo Jia Cun 索家村 in northeastern Beijing, one of the largest artist communities in Asia. At the end of 2005, when the local government was about to demolish the whole Suo Jia Cun due to the fact that building there was technically illegal, Liu started to create his well-known series Hiding in the City initially as a silent protest against the Chinese government’s lack of attention to artists’ unprotected living conditions. He let himself be painted by his assistants so that his figure seamlessly merged into the environment where he stayed stationary, camouflaged against the background.

Living in the age when China’s rapid economic development kept colliding with the cultural and ecological environments that people had been used to, Liu revealed in his photo-performance series a sense of loss, melancholy and confusion that permeated his daily life. In following years, the topics that his Hiding in the City series had been investigating were expanded from the threats that he as an artist was facing, to a broader range of social issues which impacted common people in China. In addition to Hiding in the City, a Beijing based project, since 2008 Liu has kept on developing related photo-performance series that are based in other major cities around the world. He hid himself into sites including the ruins of Pompeii, the Hollywood Sign, a slaughterhouse in Paris, the Wall Street Bull and a magazine rack in New York City, etc., as a way to question how our living experience and perceptions of truth are manipulated by various ties that bind us to our surrounding environments. As well as being an “invisible” performer, Liu is also known for his sculptural works which simultaneously evolved with his photo-performance series. Whereas the gigantic upside-down fist that was frequently featured in his early sculptures clearly conveyed political messages to viewers, his more recent sculptures such as Charger Series (2011—2012) unequivocally refer to the intersection of natural environment and consuming culture.

Zimeng Xiang

Sources:

Cabos, Marine. “Interview: Liu Bolin 刘勃麟, Artist.” September 21, 2013. Accessed August 11, 2016. http://photographyofchina.com/blog/interview-liu-bolin?rq=Liu%20Bolin.

Dagen, Philippe and Silvia Mattei. Liu Bolin. New York, NY: Abrams, 2014.

Liu, Bolin, Michelle Marie Roy, and Eli Klein Fine Art. Liu Bolin. Edited by Christina Lee, Sarah McNaughton, Elizabeth Misitano, and Elena Parasco. Translated by Lynn Chou and Jinglan Huang. New York, NY: Eli Klein Fine Art, 2012.

Mattei, Silvia. “Camouflage Revealed: Liu Bolin and the Art of Mimetic Performance.” Galerie Paris-Beijing, July 2012. Accessed August 11, 2016. http://www.galerieparisbeijing.com/artists/liubolin/articles.html.