Don Gallery is proud to announce that it will be presenting LIU Ren’s solo project at Art Basel HongKong 2021. The exhibition will center on the artist’s recent mixed media work.
LIU is passionate about Ancient Greek philosophy, and its themes often appear in his artistic practice. The artist understands the sea to be a visual spatial metaphor for time, or rather, to him, the boundlessness of the sea resonates with the boundlessness of time. The lived experience of the Ancient Greeks was informed by the Aegean Sea which formed the boundary of their territory, while time was the eternal subject of their philosophical inquiry into the metaphysical. It was Heraclitus -- a man born in that very land -- who coined the phrase, “Panta Rhei” (tr: all things are in flux), a lyrical statement steeped in poetry. In this phrase, LIU discovered a clear conceptual spark, which compelled him to create a series of the same name.
The majority of LIU’s work considers man’s plight through the dimension of time, and the “Panta Rhei” series is no exception. In this series, the artist uses roughly textured straw toilet paper to create a mulch, and then presses the mulch into bricks of paper. After preparing a flat and dry surface on thestraw paper bricks, LIU screen prints the words “Panta Rhei” in various shades to evoke the visualform of undulating waves. Lastly, he uses gold leaf to limn the cracks in the paper bricks which are left behind by the air-drying process. In terms of form, this process is like yet unlike painting.
LIU was educated as a printmaker, and though he uses screen printing techniques in this series, the process of creating bricks of paper and embedding gold leaf is more common to sculpture or installation. In this series, LIU often places elements in direct confrontation with each other. Visually speaking, dry paper is used to evoke the liquid currents of the ocean. While straw toilet paper -- one of the cheapest and most disposable consumer products -- is the chief material used in a work of art which strives at timelessness. In the crucial category of thematics, we find contrast in the mutually metaphorical relationship between the solidified sea and elongated time.
At Don Gallery’s Art Basel Hong Kong booth, audiences will not only find three works from LIU’s “Panta Rhei” series, they will also be able to view the installation, A Solidified Sea, and the mixed media pieces Hi, See You in a Billion Years, and Reincarnation. Of these, A Solidified Sea presents an hourglass emptied of sand, with an acrylic cube blocking the bottleneck. Each surface of the cube is covered in gold leaf, with a pixelated cross section of pieces from the “Panta Rhei” series imprinted upon it. Just as the sea is a metaphor for time, the hourglass is Time’s metonymy. LIU has trasmutatedmovement into stillness, and transformed flow into solidity. This is in line with Henri Bergson's theory of time in pre-modern society, in which he posits that elongated time can only be perceived and understood when it is solidified into static space.
In Hi, See You in a Billion Years, straw toilet paper is reshaped into a small bellows. On one side ispainted an image of Elon Musks’ Tesla hurling into space, and on the other is a recreated book coverfrom The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. In Reincarnation, images of astronauts and fetuses in the womb loom strikingly on bricks of straw toilet paper on an oval background. The figures are placed inthe same positions as God and Adam in Michelangelo’s The Creation of Adam to form a confrontational relationship with certain sequences of time. Temporality or consciousness of time are the inescapable subjects in all of LIU’s works.
In life, “everything flows,” and it may be as Herclitus also says “no man ever steps in the same river twice.” But at least the audience may step into LIU Ren’s work over and over again -- a form of communion with the recognition of that elongating stretch of time within a solidified sea.