Four video and photography works are featured in artist LiuYujia’s first solo exhibition, casting light on things she’s been recently interested in: objects and the fields they belong to.
The artist manages to bring people’s imagination, perception and logic into play by resorting to theatrical and movie languages, probing into the interplay among objects, time and human beings during the process of an original story developed into narrative copies.
Her works reveal a network of relationships in a visual way: distance and scale, the dynamic and the static, position and depth of field, incentives and outcomes, etc. By intentionally erasing the presence of human from the scene, she intends to detach objects from the narrative scenes and logic they are dependent on to the maximum degree, and to create a kind of suspenseful atmosphere within these delicate confronting, or ever-changing and unstable subtle relevance. When object is being magnified and focused as a subject, no matter its inherent uncontrollable state of motion or its specious identity release some uncertain and fragmented information. By utilizing viewers’ attempt to investigate the “truth”, the being of objects lures people to be trapped in some delusory and possibly non-existent metaphors With the transforming of time, objects, as the subject of narrative, present the state that is hardly conscious in daily experience and play a role beyond itself. From the intact and yet slowed time captured by fixed long shot to the fragmented and inconsistent zeit-collage; from the real time during the photographing to the “reel time” experienced by viewers, the artist endeavors to present and observe objects and the implicative human reactions within different dimensions of time.
The presence of human seems to retreat to an inconspicuous and accessorial position. Nevertheless, they more or less leave some traces on the artworks. The motion of the lifeless objects is exactly valid evidence of the all-time presence of ‘the third man’.
Plus the intentional intervention with narrative time and the network of responses between artworks and views, the fields of truth and fiction constantly overlap, ultimately forming a relationship of “being-for-others” in between objects and people. Such a “serve as a foil” effect is where the charm of narrative language lies.
Born in Sichuan Province in 1981, Liu Yujia graduated from Sichuan Fine Arts Institute in 2004. And in 2009, she gained her MA degree from London College of Communication in University of Arts London. She now lives and works in Beijing. Since 2013, Liu Yujia started to concentrate on the creation of video and photography. Her works have been selected into the exhibition ‘Urban Living Room’, City Pavilions of the 10th Shanghai Biennial (2014) and ‘The System of Objects’ at Shanghai Minsheng Art Museum (2015). The Ray, her first single-channel video work, was selected into the Film sector at 2015 Art Basel.
