Don Gallery is honored to announce that LIU Ren's participation in UBS Art Collection Exhibition at Shanghai West Bund Art Center, Hall D, from 11 November to 14 November 2021 .
Panta Rhei-139219(1), LIU Ren 刘任, 2021. Silk screening on straw paper, gold foil 丝网草纸 金箔, 219 × 139 cm
LIU Ren 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 the straw paper bricks, LIU screen prints the words “Panta Rhei” in various shades to evoke the visual form 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. 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.
Biography
LIU Ren (b. 1983) graduated from Department of Printmaking, Fine Art College of Shanghai University (2007), currently living and working in Shanghai. LIU’s practice mainly involves painting, sculpture and installation. He so often draws inspirations from everyday materials that surround him and conceals accumulated sentiments and analytical texts behind the clean, neat and orderly visual forms. He attends to the passage of time, the consumption of life and the state of being, where fragmented information and mundane materials are transformed. LIU’s work has been presented by Art Basel (Hongkong, 2021), Sinan Mansions (Shanghai, 2020), West Bund Art Centre-Ceramic House (Shanghai, 2019), UNArt Center (Shanghai, 2019), Frank F. Yang Art and Education Foundation (Shenzhen, 2018), Yuz Museum (Shanghai, 2017), chi K11 art museum (Shanghai, 2016), Shanghai Minsheng Art Museum (Shanghai, 2016), Shanghai 21st Century Minsheng Art Museum (Shanghai, 2015), CAFA Art Museum (Beijing, 2015), Shanghai Himalayas Museum (Shanghai, 2014), etc. His solo exhibitions include "Yesterday Once More" (Don Gallery, Shanghai, 2021), "Times" (Don Gallery, Shanghai, 2018), "Spring, River, Flowers, Moon, Night" (Don Gallery, Shanghai, 2016), "FILTRATE" (White Space Beijing, Beijing, 2013), "Youth: Everything in Between - Liu Ren & Su Chang" (Don Gallery, Shanghai, 2012), etc.
