LIU SHIYUAN: AS SIMPLE AS CLAY: YUZ MUSEUM, SHANGHAI

Yuz Project Room is an independent exhibition program, which invites artists to make site-specific artworks and project, boldly engaged with the museum, its surroundings and the audiences, aiming to explore the possibilities in contemporary art, and focus on the ideology and semantics in the present culture and society. Continuous with its opening in September 2015, Yuz Project Room will present Liu Shiyuan’s project As Simple As Clay from November 14th, 2015 to January 31st, 2016.

As a female artist born after 1980s, Liu Shiyuan’s works share a tight connection with her life and visual experience. Nurtured by Chinese traditional education, she chose to go to New York for further artistic study after graduation, and now lives and works in Beijing and Copenhagen. It is her multicultural life experience that drives her to inspect the boundaries among different cultural patterns as well as make a change or doubt about the artistic language and creative language. Via the various media of photography, collage, installation and video, she investigates the frontier in her artistic practice and challenges the limitation of perception and experience to seek for the essence and the interaction among life, existence and perception in the new cultural context.

In this project, Liu Shiyuan will present her work, entitled As Simple as Clay, which was created just after her moved to Copenhagen. It was the first time for her to realize that she could not live the way she likes, which perhaps because she needed to learn a new language. In this case, she tried to abandon the existing logic she had mastered, taking the art as the experiment and start over. Begun with the mud, the most original material, she proceeded to experiment what kind of works she would create. By googling its image, she discovered some similarities between the mud and other objects. Then she explored the visual counterparts of the mud to create a series of related objects such as cheese, butter, flour paste and soap etc. by taking its advantage of plasticity, and then photographed a series of photos as well. The mud here is just a representational material, which could easily transfer between the medium and the object. The backgrounds on the images were specially designed in blue, to reach the visual assimilation and representational unity through digestion as well as blur the existence of the real space. In another words, it does not mean that seeing is believing.

In the process of creating and constantly introspection, Liu Shiyuan integrates her cultural origins with her later diverse cultural encounters via presenting her concepts and ideas in visual forms. What she thinks is the different worldviews from different people in different systems, and thus to deliver a subjective reality worth discussing.