Liu Bolin has been making quite a stir on the net recently with his Ghost Man photos. The process Bolin works through maybe simple but the effects are astounding, it's the art of camouflage taken to a whole new level. Forget camera trickery, digital manipulation, I'm sure if there is a copy of Photoshop on Bolin's PC it lays dormant for most of the time, because this guy does more than paint the world, digitally or otherwise, he paints himself, literally. He paints himself, his face, his body, his clothes with such precision, such attention to detail, that if you have come across any of his work, you'd be forgiven for shrugging your shoulders and moving onto another site, blissfully unaware of the trouble this guy goes to to perfect his art.
This is a new level of self-portraiture, perhaps reflecting the invisibility of the individual in the machinations of world governance, the pipe-dreams of political, militaristic and corporate leaders, or simply the desensitisation that many human beings encounter in daily life, emanating from themselves and all those around them. Bolin's work is like a conceptual advancement of Where's Waldo? He teaches you to look and look again, study your surroundings, encounter your environment on a far deeper level, and perhaps even question the notion of perception itself.
If first came across Bolin's work just a few days ago via the counter-culture magazine Hi-Fructose, you can also find his work at the Eli Klein Fine Art Gallery amongst others, I really think this guy needs some better representation, sure there's plenty of content about the guy, but no trace of a site, blog, anything that you can say marks Bolin's spot on the web. Then again, he might prefer it that way, to remain as elusive as the nature of his photography.
What I can tell you is Liu Bolin was born in 1973, Shandong China. He has a specific fascination for the world of nature, more precisely the fact that many of its species have an ability to covertly avoid detection from predators through a variety of different behavioral and chemical processes. This ability provides Bolin with a wealth of metaphorical material to ply his views on the state of humanity today, namely our lack of survival instinct, our shared weakness bred by our inordinate success as a species. He seperates the human race from the rest of the animal world. We are the one race that has no idea how to exist outside our acclimatised environment, no matter how the climate changes. Being born of a Post-Mao Chinese culture, Bolin has lived through a nation's cultural and political confusion, in essence an ennui, a rejection of a failed Communist tradition, as well as that of its cultural predecessors in a state that neither offers democracy nor security.
The vast population of China must make one think of one's place in the world, to be only one of 1.25 billion people calls into question any prior notions of scale, humanity or relativity. The individual is slowly drowning in a sea of its own fertile imagination, physically subsumed by the masses, waiting for the inevitable lack of existence which will pale in comparison to the provisions of the present and past, be they materially, phiolosophically, or politically. We cannot afford to be individual, for to stand out in a crowd is to be a target, to speak up is to risk the condemnation of the majority, the cultural malaise has set, and there is no more space for change.
There's a rather fascinating interview with Liu Bolin at Galerie Bertin and his biography at the Eli Klein gallery if you'd like to know more about this fascinating artist.
