Liu Shiyuan: Isolated Above, Connected Down: Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York

Tanya Bonakdar Gallery is pleased to present Isolated Above, Connected Down, a solo exhibition by Liu Shiyuan. This is the Chinese new media artist's first major solo exhibition in the United States. On view from February 22 through April 7, 2018, the exhibition introduces Liu's latest major works, including a large-scale video installation in the first floor gallery, a series of six photography works in the second floor main gallery and a felt-carpeted room installation in the project space. Together these pieces demonstrate Liu’s core visual vocabulary—which references that of the cyber and the vernacular—and embody her inquiry into the relationship between mass culture, language, identity, and particularly the misconception, miscommunication and hybridization of meaning and discourse.

At once familiar and perplexing, personal and universal, Liu’s work blends together a myriad of apparent as well as hidden details and messages. Her vocabulary, uniquely heterogeneous and delightfully tongue-in-cheek, is born through her experience growing up in a rapidly globalizing China, and as a young cosmopolitan member of the Chinese diaspora. A constellation of found, made, visual and textual elements, Isolated Above, Connected Down simulates an intensified, satirized microcosm of a world inundated with commercial, popular and internet cultures. In this world, we are surrounded by fictional, truthful, manipulated and unedited content from known and unknown sources, all of which have thoroughly permeated one another. The 'real' is no longer discernible from the orchestrated, and ‘original’ meanings become lost in this permeation process. For Liu, meaning and value are largely arbitrary and fabricated through history, and therefore precarious. Subverting these existing modalities of definition and communication, and contesting the desensitizing allure that prevails in mass culture, Liu organizes her content in ironic pairings and peculiar combinations, prompting the viewer to observe closely and ponder curiously. With this, the artist hopes to awaken truer feelings and more acute sensibilities in the viewer.

Indeed, one of the key concepts in Liu’s work is to encourage the viewer to slow down, allowing the time to observe and the mental space to wander. In the first floor gallery, the video work Isolated Above, Connected Down is projected onto a massive screen, and the viewer is invited to sit or lie down on the pillows scattered around the black-and-gray-plaid carpeted floor, as if daydreaming on the grass, looking at the sky. The video begins with a series of cloud scenes, which were shot with the camera pointing directly from the ground up toward the sky. Mimicking a relaxing mind fading into vague memories and blissful visions, sweet, pristine views of nature begin to appear: bright blossoms and lush plants, busy bees, creeks glistening under the summer sun, a tranquil pond rippling gently as gold fish glide past lily pads and lotus flowers. As the mind enters into a train of increasingly coherent thought, the video transitions into strips of rolling images, speeding up as the thought process escalates. Among the shuffling pictures are found images from the 1960s and 70s that reinforce conventional male and female roles, foreshadowing the main scene to follow.

A tense, substantial conversation takes place at a dinner table between a couple. The mother’s role is intuitive, emotional and anxious, exhausted from putting her young child to sleep. The father’s role is rational, logical and calm, eager to discuss political and metaphysical topics during dinner. The two characters’ different personalities and dispositions cause a succession of miscommunicated and misconceived ideas as the dialogue unfolds, revolving around foreign cultures, commercial production, allegory, religion and so on. Meanwhile, embedded in the dialogue are about 20 important contemporary art exhibition titles, aesthetic philosophical quotes, as well as titles of books on economic theory. These otherwise ‘highly important and charged’ titles and quotes in their respective fields are used here in an insignificant, if not pointless and petty, quarrel between two people whose perspectives already misalign, showing how seemingly fixed meaning and value can fluctuate in altered contexts.

The work’s many layers of discursive play culminate in its symbolic ending, where a prolonged closeup shot of a bee—a longstanding allegorical creature whose diligence enables perfect collective productivity akin to the Capitalist ideal—reveals its hairy and spiky anatomical features, eating from one flower after another until it dies from gluttony. We don’t know if a bee could really die from overeating, yet the overfed bee here is a fictional fragment and its greedy nature a deliberate attribution by the artist, just as the hardworking bee and its diligent nature may well be an intentional design to set a certain model for the human society.

Six large photography works are hung in the second floor main gallery. Through a process similar to the wandering mind the video work imitates, each intricate composition results from a flow-of-consciousness journey, led by minute intuitive emotional responses, as well as logical and contemplative associations. Unlike collages where different pieces of imagery are placed next to or on top of one another, Liu thinks of each photography work as one singular totality. Although the various elements in a composition are either found on the internet, digitally photographed, shot with 35 mm film, or computer-rendered, Liu align the pixels of each fragment which yield, by definition, one continuous image.