Liu Bolin sits in a side room off the new location of Magda Danysz Gallery, where his latest exhibit and the gallery’s debut, Hacker Art, is nearly finished being set up. Outside lies a sampling of his sprawling ‘Hiding in the City’ series: through paint and optical illusion (but no Photoshop), he’s hidden in plain sight amongst rainbow sparkly Mexican wrestling masks, shelves of soft drinks, the Louvre, a wall of graffiti in Queens’ now-demolished Five Pointz, and hanging cured meats in a restaurant.
"Standing in Front of Independence"
The gallery’s main attraction, however, a larger-than-life wall of heads sculpted from the green circuitry inside cell phones, marks a new direction for Liu, though on a similar theme. His past works have skewered food safety, urbanization and artistic freedom, and now Liu turns his critical eye and his knack for sending a strong message with a subtle disappearing act to the pervasiveness of technology. He uses new media art, largely iPhones, to further his ongoing critique of modern society’s tendency to ignore what’s right in front of it.
"Lifestyle Food"
“I have an interest in the materials of modern life,” Liu tells us. “The frames, the rubbish. If your life is full of something, you should make that into art.”
Before Liu photographed himself blending into the crumbling walls of his condemned art commune back in 2005, inventing the aesthetic that would define his long-running, groundbreaking ‘Hiding in the City’ series, he trained in sculpture at university, and Hacker Art displays his talents in this area.
Hacker Art's main installation
Each foreboding green head seems to have distinct facial features – a prominent nose, droopy eyes, sharp cheekbones. Viewers might get the sense that they’re being watched by the heads, and that’s because they are; in each empty eye socket lies a camera that feeds footage into TVs on the other side of the wall for other gallery-goers to watch undetected.
"If your life is full of something, you should make that into art."
The anxiety and alienation this evokes is on-theme with Liu’s work in photography. “If you are an artist, you should be very sensitive to life, and not only your life, but all human life,” he says. “When I travel, I see the problems of society. So I hide myself because I want to wake other people up, so they’ll think about whether these things are right or not.”
"Magazines"
Liu wears the same outfit in nearly all of his photos, a military uniform he covers with paint over again and again. “In my work, the process of standing like a soldier is to show my protest,” he says, reflecting on the many hours that that he must remain perfectly still while his team of assistants – young art school graduates who are keen on his work – paint his face and clothing to blend into the background of a scene he carefully chose for how it spoke to him about the anxieties and idiosyncrasies of modern life, whether it be a signpost covered in flyers or a sunflower wall.
"Info Port"
Though the tactics behind all these photos are the same, his genius for choosing scenes that evoke a subtle cultural critique keeps infinitely fresh. Some of his most poignant photos are those in which he hides others instead of himself, like for a piece in Hacker Art depicting several Indian cab drivers camouflaged in front of their vehicles or his high-profile disappearing act with French artist JR in front of the Louvre.
"Louvre" - collaboration with JR
Liu is serious when discussing these themes for much of the interview, but a goofy grin emerges when the conversation turns to his longtime friend and collaborator, gallery owner Magda Danysz, with whom he’s worked for the past seven years. “Our cooperation is very good, very exciting. Magda’s crazy all the time, just like me,” he says, with a loud belly laugh that echoes through the gallery.
Danysz agrees. “He’s very fun; I enjoy the challenge,” she says. “He’s always going further. We could keep on showing the photos [that made him famous], but each time he’s like, ‘What’s next?’”
"Red No. 1"
Hacker Art aims to answer that question. Liu did a performance piece at the opening in which he hung dozens of iPhones – their cameras turned to selfie mode – from hooks all over his sweatshirt and pants, and strapped an iPad around his forehead so that it covered his face, screen out.
Liu's performance piece at the opening of Hacker Art
He then crawled, lizard-like, on the floor in an empty circular space around a throng of people, turning his iPad face toward different members of the crowd, wavering his head inches from theirs. Instead of his face, they saw their own face in the screen of the tablet.
The phones hooked to his clothing kept returning to the home screen of their own volition, which seemed only to add to the critique on technology. Most eerily of all, nearly everyone in the crowd was filming Liu with their own phones rather than looking at him directly; just as he’d planned, he found a new way to disappear in plain sight.
Through May 17, 10am-6pm. Magda Danysz Gallery, 256 Beijing Dong Lu, by Jiangxi Zhong Lu 北京东路256号,近江西中路 (www. magdagallery.com)
All artwork by Liu Bolin; images courtesy of Magda Danysz Gallery.
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