literally and figuratively, Liu Bolin disappears in his creations. In their photo-performances, it is the spectator who needs to discover the meaning of the work, who needs to detect the contours of its silhouette and reveal the human form.
That is why it is said that it is not always easy to detect Liu, since the Chinese artist prefers to hide in the background, literally. It is thus that through his camouflage art he has earned the nickname of the "invisible man".
Through his sculptures, installations, photography, and paintings, Liu explores the tensions between individualism and collectivism, particularly in his China native.
Performed so often, in so many places on the planet, his work is permeated with the idea that in this world there are innumerable ways to be swallowed, innumerable ways to deny the own individuality.
For the young artist, his art may be the setting of the city which reduces you to a shadow on the wall; It may be a reflection of our consumer society, or of what threatens to absorb you.
Liu Bolin He was born in 1973 in Shandong, China. He received his bachelor's degree from Shandong College of Arts in 1995 and his master's degree from Central Academy of Fine Arts in 2001. Liu currently resides and works in Beijing, China.
His artistic career began in the early 1990s, when China emerged from the crushing effects of the Cultural Revolution and began its rapid economic growth and political stability.
In his most famous series, he paints himself to blend in with the background and invites his audience to search for the 'Invisible Man', which represents the forgotten men of the growing economic superpower that saw him born.
Crossing mediums such as performance art, photography, and social activism, Liu dissects the tense relationship between the individual and society by "disappearing" into environments that are sites of intrigue, containment and criticism.
Both Liu's photographs and sculptures have been exhibited in numerous museums and institutions around the world, and he has collaborated with Kenny Scharf, JR, Jon Bon Jovi, Jean Paul Gaultier, Fernando Botero, Carlos Cruz-Diez, and Annie Leibovitz.
Parallel to his photographic work, Liu continues to practice sculpture, the medium with which he began as an artist, and creates human figures made of electronic components, motherboards, USB cables. This sculptural work completes, and in a certain way illuminates, the series of the Invisible Man.
Part of the same vision of humanity in danger, and invites us to question whether our species is perhaps on the way to dissolving in the technological, economic and political structures of contemporary times.
At the end of it all, the perpetual disappearance of the artist is above all a pretext to put him back on the scene.
