Liu Chuang

    BIOGRAPHY

    Liu Chuang (b. 1978, Tianmen) currently lives and works in Shanghai. In 2001, he received his BA from the Hubei Institute of Fine Arts.

    Liu Chuang works primarily with film, sculpture, readymade and installation. His works often integrate long-term history and ecological arc for imagination, tracing the social, cultural and economic transformations of contemporary China. Weaving narratives that connect the micro and macro, past and present, fiction and reality, Liu Chuang explores how vast and complex changes in nature, tradition, demographics, cutting-edge technology, and socio-economic systems affect individuals and their engagements with the world as a whole.

    His works have been featured in art museums including: National Museum of Contemporary Art Athens (ΕΜΣΤ), Athens, Greece (2022); Astrup Fearnley Museet, Oslo, Norway (2022, 2017, 2007); Centre Pompidou, Paris, France (2021, 2020, 2019); Centre Pompidou – Metz, Metz, France (2021); Kunsthalle Basel, Basel, Switzerland (2021); Seoul Museum of Art, Seoul, South Korea (2021); Power Station of Art, Shanghai, China (2021, 2014); MOT, Tokyo, Japan (2020); Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Taipei (2020); Para Site Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China (2020, 2016, 2012, 2009); NTU Centre For Contemporary Art, Singapore (2022, 2016); National Gallery Singapore, Singapore (2020); Guangdong Times Museum, Guangzhou, China (2019, 2018, 2017); Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, US (2018); House of World Cultures, Berlin, Germany (2016); Museum Berardo, Lisbon, Portugal (2016); Foundation Louis Vuitton, Paris, France (2016); Tampa Museum of Art, Tampa, US (2014); UCCA, Beijing, China (2013); Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, UK (2012); Minsheng Art Museum, Shanghai, China (2011); Pinacoteca Giovanni e Marella Agnelli, Turin, Italy (2010); New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, US (2009); Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art, Thessaloniki, Greece (2004); He Xiangning Art Museum, Shenzhen, China (2003) among others.

    His recent biennales and triennials include: 2nd Thailand Biennial: Butterflies Frolicking on the Mud (2021); 11th Seoul Mediacity Biennale: One Escape At A Time (2021); 13th Shanghai Biennale: Bodies of Water (2021); 3rd Guangzhou Image Triennale 2021: Intermingling Flux (2021); Kathmandu Triennale 2077: Garden of Six Seasons (2021); 12th Taipei Biennial 2020: You and I Don’t Live on the Same Planet (2020); 5th Dhaka Art Summit: Seismic Movements (2020); 5th Ural Industrial Biennial of Contemporary Art: Immortality (2019); 7th Asian Art Biennial: The Strangers from Beyond the Mountain and The Sea (2019); 10th Shanghai Biennale: Social Factory (2014); 10th Gwangju Biennale: Burning Down the House (2014); The 43rd (Inter) National Salon of Artists (43 SNA): Guide To The Unknown (2013); 1st New Museum Triennale: The Generational – Younger Than Jesus (2009) among others.

    His film festival participation includes: 38th Internationale Kurzfilm Festival Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany (2022 forthcoming); 32nd Singapore International Film Festival (SGIFF), Singapore (2021); 66th Berlinale (Berlin International Film Festival), Berlin, Germany (2016); 7th Bucharest International Experimental Film Festival (BIEFF), Bucharest, Romania (2016); 5th Kyiv International Shot Film Festival, Kyiv, Ukraine (2016); 8th Crosstalk Video Art Festival: Dark Ecology, Budapest, Hungary (2016); Arkipel-Jakarta International Documentary & Experimental Film Festival, Jakarta, Indonesia (2016) among others.

    Numerous prestigious public institutions have collected Liu’s works, such as: Tate Modern, London, UK; Centre Pompidou, Paris, France; M+ Collection, Hong Kong, China; Astrup Fearnley Museet For Moderne Kunst, Oslo, Norway; LUMA Art Foundation, Arles, France; Kadist Collection, Paris, France; San Francisco, US; Rubell Family Collection, Miami, US; DSL Collection, Paris, France; The Walther Collection, New York, US; Guangdong Museum of Art, Guangzhou, China; K11 Art Foundation, Hong Kong, China; Sigg Private Collection, Switzerland; New Century Art Foundation, Beijing, China; Taikang Art Space, Beijing, China.

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    Artworks

    EXHIBITIONS

    NEWS

    ARTICLES

    • Meet the artist-explorer Liu Chuang | Alvin Li

       

      He tackles bitcoin mining and engineered nature in his ambitious installations

      Nestled in the Shanghai suburb of Songjiang, Liu Chuang’s studio is piled to the rafters with neatly organized books. Maps of various scales hang on the wall. Among the many charts and diagrams stuck to the shelves, I also spot a periodic table of elements. This scholarly setting recalls the office of a historian or a geographer more than an artist’s studio – and yet, over the past few years, Liu’s work has impressed the Chinese art milieu with an ever more interdisciplinary speculative practice that spans video, sculpture, and installation. Employing an expansive web of references that continuously stretches the discursive framework of his own work, the artist has also challenged the limits of Chinese contemporary art as a whole.

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    • Cannibalised cultures and colonised territories | Mark Rappolt

       

      One of the ways in which we assimilate the new is to insist that it is, in fact, old. Nothing comes from nothing, as the old saying goes. That certainly seems to be the case in Shanghai-based Liu Chuang’s three-channel videowork Bitcoin Mining and Field Recordings of Ethnic Minorities (2018). The work takes the form of found and filmed footage with a voiceover narrative that traces material and immaterial lines of power that have been deployed in China, over the past few thousand years, to conquer people and territories, and to generate material and immaterial profit. The narrative moves from economic inflation triggered in eastern China during the fifth century BCE, when King Jing of Zhou reduced the amount of copper in coins in order to fuel an obsession with creating enormous bronze chime bells, to nomadic bitcoin miners, operating outside any centralised banking system, herding their rigs across present-day China in harmony with the seasonal and regional variations in energy production.

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    • In Focus: Liu Chuang | Paul Teasdal

       

      Liu Chuang’s latest work, Segmented Landscape (2014), consists of six metal window grilles, each bearing a distinct geometric pattern. Installed above visitors’ heads in the main hall of the Power Station of Art, the venue for the 10th Shanghai Biennale, it is lit by spotlights while an artiȷcial breeze causes pieces of white gauze, hanging like curtains behind each grille, to shift gently. The shadows cast by the grilles appear as patterns transposed onto the fabric. The overall eȴect is of a series of photograms, which seems ȷtting since the work is, to some extent, a snapshot of China in the late 1980s and early ’90s, when such window guards suddenly began appearing on houses and apartments across the country. At that time, they could be seen as a visual reminder of China’s burgeoning prosperity; here, they seem a quiet lament to the individualization that has been a by-product of economic growth.

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    • Love Story: Liu Chuang | Paul Laster

       

      No stranger to the American art scene, Liu Chuang’s conceptual art has been featured in several outstanding group shows in the United States, including “The Generational: Younger Than Jesus” (2009) at New York’s New Museum, “28 Chinese” (2013) at Miami’s Rubell Family Collection, and “My Generation: Young Chinese Artists,” which recently debuted at the Tampa Museum of Art as well as the Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg.

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