Between Art Lab (Beijing) is pleased to announce the opening of “TRAP – LOOP”, Liu Ting’s solo exhibition, at 11:00, Mar. 18, 2017. Liu Ting, born in the 1990s, is a New York-based artist. The exhibition covers a variety of media, like new media interaction, mechanical interaction installation, video, photography, etc. The artist turns the exhibition space into an experiment field of “self-verification”. Our mind will make a tour by itself in this “loop” that keeps moving. The exhibition will last until Apr. 10, 2017. We look forward to your visit.
With the associative distance between “trap” and “loop” in mind, Liu fashions the exhibition hall into a moving experiment field and arranges the exhibits in such a way as to lead the audience to a mental site where logic embarks on a journey of transfiguration. With a fragment of video the exhibition starts. Then the artist keeps deconstructing, translating and extending it so as to get the viewers involved in her visual and sensorial “game with the self”. In the ongoing unfolding, releasing and interacting on the micro-level, one after another interactive images of the self are produce. Therefore we cannot say for sure whether the image has got its self integrated into the virtual sense in the site or it is something we can rely on to review the possibilities of the “self” that keeps generating and extending itself. With “being” and “non-being” switching between movement and stillness, we identify in the loop of logic a way the artist approaches the world: the self image is transformed into a visual object that gets continually disassembled and expanded.
On the other hand, the exhibition site is turned into a confusing and captivating game with the help of all kinds of art forms and techniques, like a preset a lie, a critical point between the known and the unknown, or a trap laid from God’s perspective. In this trap, the overhead view is abstracted into an endless loop. When all the senses and meanings get lost in this “almighty” loop, nothing seems to remain or carry meaning. The micro perspective, in the meanwhile, becomes something existential, with emotions, perception and feelings mobilized again, so the fine and smooth movement becomes meaning itself to allow observation and analysis to continue. As the artist told us, “‘Feather, Navel’ is quite an accident. A feather fell off my skirt, one so specially shaped that I couldn’t help putting it to some use. Starting at Navel, I asked if she knew the importance of the navel in Buddhism, its energy, and anything about it. I put the feather on her navel and then slowly blow it off. At that moment I had nothing to say. It was so impressive and I felt lucky to have filmed it. Her ribs and chest, as well as the belly, heaved with every breath.”
Moving from “trap” to “loop” semantically, we follow different clues to thinking. Due to the ongoing circulation, “sense” becomes vague and ambiguous: your perspective and location determines the result. Starting with the micro details, Liu never stops “magnifying” and “converting” these details and reaches the infinite self in the end. In her final new media interactive works, the viewers, amid the switching movement and stillness, are taken into an endless loop of being and non-being to build an experiment field for self movement and observation.
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