Liu Guangyun

From 16 July to 24 September 2015

In Liu Guangyun’s professional life there have been been two important events that have marked his artistic career and positioned him in a first place in Chinese art. On one hand the assignment of the official video of the presentation of the 2008 Olympics and, on the other, been one of the invited artists at the opening of the Zendai Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in Shanghai.
In his art the face becomes a consumption material for society. In a sense, it refers to a sense of helplessness when a natural person is seen and used as a kind of material thus loosing the original identity.
Cosmetic, digital and surgical manipulation all aim to create a commonly accepted norm of (artificial) beauty. The boundary between truth and artificiality is blurred or even erased in some cases due to the power of capital and media.
Those beautiful faces which are often seen in commercial print and online media would amaze people by their visual attraction. However by sealing those beautiful and yet artificial faces in semitransparent resin, the faces look somewhat like specimens immersed in formalin. His work reflects not only the destruction of the traditional moral system but also a fundamental change in the social value system due to the overwhelming influence of omnipresent commercialization. On the one hand, people are aware of the negative influence of commercialization. And on the other hand, they feel helpless when they try to fight against it.