Liu Chuang, born in 1978 in Hubei, is a theoretically-progressive social interventionist whose practice seeks to destabilise the comforts of daily life through the aesthetic disruption and detournement of social rules. Engaging with the economics of the everyday, Liu is a highly political artist who works alongside the tradition of institutional critique to advance his own brand of sensibility.
Read MoreThe artist’s task is to reveal the hidden structures of the prosaic rules that lie behind the comfortable truce negotiated by global capitalism, often bringing his creations to bear upon the body of the observer or otherwise inserting his self-consciously ‘artistic’ production into the realm of the real. The trace of the personal is everywhere in his works, which systematically absorb the labor of the body into their anti-didactic attacks on complacency.
Having moved to Beijing after making a name for himself in the boomtown of Shenzhen, Liu Chuang is currently in the process of adapting his critical artistic practice to the layered urbanity of the capital. His process-based conceptual work takes as its starting point the failures of relational aesthetics, pushing the morphing art world into new territories.
Participating in Taipei Biennial 2020, Liu Chuang presented Lithium Lake and the Lonely Island of Polyphony (2020), a 3-channel video that focuses on the industrial production of lithium ore: an element that is key to a carbon lock-out, whose production chain stretches from Chile to the highlands of China. The film also considers traditional polyphonic music as a form of prototypical technology.
Lithium Lake and the Lonely Island of Polyphony starts out following two completely different threads. One is traditional polyphonic music. Polyphony is now understood to have been a common form of music in ancient times, and this has shaken the view of music history as a linear evolution from monophonic to polyphonic. Because the origins of music and technology are intertwined, the rise of the internet and digital archives provides new opportunities for music anthropologists to interpret traditional polyphonic music. In rethinking the origin of music, the musicologist Joseph Jordania has depicted a non-inscribed map of the Anthropocene. Meanwhile, since every subtle change in the chords and rhythm attracts the attention of each performer, it is a way of transmitting a signal to the entire network. Therefore, the model of polyphony may be seen as a technology unlock. The other thread is the nightmare of industrialized countries and multinational corporations—path dependence and technology lock-in. Brian Arthur’s theory of these two phenomenons is one such concept, which derives computer models from iterative nonlinear programs to project in various areas of society and the economy. It provides new strategies for neoliberal economic development.
