One of the most famous and eccentric Chinese artists, Liu Bolin known by the international media as the ‘Invisible Man’ because he hides in his performance artworks by camouflaging himself in the background. Liu Bolin is an artist born in China’s Shandong province in 1973, and he earned his Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Shandong College of Arts in 1995 and his Master of Fine Arts from the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing in 2001.
He travels with around 30 kg of paints. He doesn’t use Photoshop, just a team of “makeup artists.” He dresses in uniform. Between “being” and “not being”, he chooses camouflage, by immersion. He is the performance artist Liu Bolin.
Liu belongs to the generation that came of age in the early 1990s, when China emerged from the rubble of the Cultural Revolution and was beginning to enjoy rapid economic growth and relative political stability. Liu Bolin is best known for his series of performance photography ‘Hiding in the City’. Since his first solo shows in Beijing in 1998, Liu Bolin’s work has received international recognition and has been displayed in numerous museums and institutions across the globe. Among other international venues, his distinctive photographs and sculptures have been shown at the major contemporary photography festival Les Recontres d’Arles and he had solo shows at Dashanzi Art Zone in Beijing , Galerie Bertin-Toublanc in Paris, Eli Klein Fine Art in New York, Boxart Gallery in Verona. He now lives and works in Beijing.
Claiming, “I put my thinking of the whole of society and my view of the entire world into my artworks”, Liu Bolin produces sculptures, installations, paintings and photographs in which he critiques global societies. Though he has traveled to cities like New York and Paris for his work, he focuses principally on his native China, characterized by rampant development and consumerism.
The ‘‘chameleon’’ stands in front of iconic cultural, historical, and commercial sites, camouflages himself to blend (almost) seamlessly into his surroundings, and photographs himself. The resulting images show him dissolved into shelves of junk food or the Great Wall—a Taoist vision of oneness with the world, and a warning of contemporary society’s consumptive power.