Liu Bolin: the great disappearing act

Galerie Paris-Beijing is one of those French galleries that set up shop in Brussels a while ago. Not in yet another white cube, but in Victor Horta’s splendid Hôtel Winssinger in Sint-Gillis/Saint-Gilles. The gallery, as its name suggests, specialises in Chinese contemporary art. It is currently presenting, for the first time in Belgium, a major retrospective of the work of Liu Bolin. Liu has at times been dubbed “the invisible man” and described as a chameleon artist. An example: the exhibition includes a photograph of a wall with graffiti. At first sight, there doesn’t seem to be anything special about it – until you notice that the artist is standing in front of the wall, with his face and clothing painted so that he completely disappears into the background.

Liu undertook this kind of action for the first time when, in the lead-up to the Olympic Games, the Chinese government demolished the village where his studio was located. As a protest, he took a photograph in which he was completely swallowed up by the ruins of his studio. That was the beginning of an extensive series in which he took the same approach again and again. With the help of make-up artists, after hours of make-up and posing, a photograph would be taken (and subjected to no digital processing whatsoever), in front of an often symbolic location. One shows the artist in front of the Chinese flag: Liu’s eye is partly painted over with a piece of one of the stars in the flag. In another photograph the artist comes close to blending with the vegetable section in a supermarket.

It is all amazingly well done. And even though you become familiar with the device after a while, there are still some photographs in which you really have to search hard for the artist. Forklift, for example, in which Liu turns out to be standing in front of the vehicle’s gigantic wheels.
The exhibition also includes some of Liu’s sculptures – which are among the very worst that Chinese contemporary art has to offer: pure kitsch, clamouring for attention. Liu began his career as a sculptor, before switching to photography – a good decision and one he should stick to.

Liu Bolin > 25/5, di/ma/Tu > za/sa/Sa 11 > 19.00, gratis/gratuit/free, GALERIE PARIS-BEIJING, Hôtel Winssinger, Munthofstraat 66 rue de l’Hôtel des Monnaies, Sint-Gillis/Saint-Gilles, 02-851.04.13, www.parisbeijingphotogallery.com