Eli Klein Gallery with Art Asia presents:
Liu Bolin’s Hiding in New York
This particular photo series of Beijing’s Liu Bolin is almost as fun to discuss as it is to see from a distance and approach. It seems everything about the art and the artist is not what it seems. Just as the pieces trick you, you also feel a bit tricked by the artist’s process when you learn about it – and both of these feelings last only a full minute before the heaviness and depth of the process and the pieces sink in and take permanent residence.
Hiding in New York, presented in Scope’s 2011 Art Asia show by the Eli Klein Gallery, is another series by the artist that is photographic in nature, and are a kind of post card from the city, showing an array of different images. With incredibly high attention to detail, a human figure can be seen totally blended into the background by being covered in paint to match and disappear them into their surroundings. The walk to one of the photographs, beginning ten feet away, is a wonderful, transformative journey. The iconography in the scenes, of this series in particular, ring heavily civic and blue collar. Across the walls were images of trains, tractors, piles of coal, and asphalt roads. There was also China’s flag in one image, and America’s in another. The hidden figure appears once you see the ground painted onto his shoes, the tread of a large tractor’s tire painted across his pants, or the grays and blacks of coal painted across his face to vanish him. As a painter, exploring the details of these scenes enough to reproduce them on a human body is a wonderful achievement in itself.
Both the trick, and the fascinating aspect of the process, is that the artist Liu Bolin does not do the painting part of this process. He, rather, is the person in all of the pictures. Some people immediately find that controversial, wondering how he can call it his work if he has assistants do the painting. But just as all the landscapes are meticulously selected by him, he oversees his assistants in the complex process of painting and framing, but is able to have the experience of existing in his art and enduring the struggle of blending and staying still.
Having come from a sculptural background gives the artist as well a unique set of skills, but after Chinese authorities shut his studio down in 2005 in Beijing he was inspired to make the Hiding in the City series. Bolin reveals, “In the development of Chinese society, we experienced movements which were against humanity and purged people’s minds. I chose to camouflage my body into the environment because this way people will pay more attention to the background’s social property.”
The ideas within the series were born of a desire to challenge China’s brand of propaganda in its history, but as the series moves into other cities of the world, like New York, it serves a larger, more sweeping message. It creates questions about the effects of our environment in many ways. Bolin explains, “Environment here can mean social, cultural, ecological, and so on.” A lot of people have grasped the political messages within, but Bolin’s work gets broader as it evolves. Bolin continues, “I also want to emphasize and to draw people’s attention to the relationship between the grand scale of cultural development and the role of a single individual.”
By Jason Kesser
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