Liu Di is a Chinese artist born in 1985 in the province of Shanxi, China. In 2009 he graduated from the Department of Professional Photography of the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing and just one year later, in 2010, he won the Lacoste Elysee Award for his series entitled “Animal Regulations”.
Liu Di – Animal Regulation IV No. 4
Liu Di is an artist who, to create his works, uses digitally manipulated photographs to investigate the friction between the natural world and the inhabitants of cities in China. Use digital tools like Photoshop to relate human and animal figures and the landscape, changing its proportions. In fact, the distortion of the proportions of his subjects places them within the urban and natural landscapes of his land, China.
Liu Di – Animal Regulation No.2
In 2012 he created one of his most famous and important series playing with the juxtaposition between the disproportionate human nudes and the natural environment.
Exhibition
“By violating the rules of common sense, we can break the hypnotic trance induced by the family reality”
Liu Di – The Weigh of Oneself No.1
In 2013 he creates one of his most recent series, evolving to the previous series, “Animal Regulations”. The series features a series of exaggeratedly large, cartoon-like wild animals, such as the giant rabbit in Animal Regulation No. 7, sitting amidst the destroyed landscapes of residential neighborhoods. Their heads are disproportionately small in relation to their massive bodies giving them a caricatural comic effect.
Liu Di – Animal Regulation No.7
Liu Di conceived the project for the first time while walking through the crowded outskirts of Beijing, a city that was very familiar to him. “Looking at the decrepit living blocks, I had the vague but strong feeling that something was missing between the ground and the sky”
Liu Di – Animal Regulation IV No. 18
“I felt the urge to add something that would push people to look at familiar scenes with a new and long look”
“Something powerful and impossible to ignore, but not something that would make people panic. … In the end I decided it was supposed to be a huge animal”
Liu Di – Animal Regulation IV
Thus, using Photoshop, she re-proportioned a panda, a rhino, a monkey and a frog and placed them in gigantic dimensions in squalid urban contexts. By making these heavy-bottomed beasts locked up in the back streets, in the yards and in the courtyards of social housing, she highlights the relationship between nature and human society.
Liu Di – Animal Regulation No. 8
These works look at a mutually destructive relationship through the ruins of both human and animal life spaces. Her photographs distort the banality of reality to provoke the viewer to review her urban surroundings.
Liu Di – Animal Regulation III No. 10
Through the images, composed of over-sized subjects set in suburbs, settings like residential complexes, Hutong neighborhoods and scenes of demolished houses, transforms the urban landscape into a surreal playground on which towering massive inflated animals, but confined by the surrounding environment.
Liu Di – Animal Regulation No.17
Exhibitions: 2010–2015 reGeneration2: Tomorrow’s Photographers Today – A Travelling Exhibition, the Musee de I’Elysee, Lausanne, Switzerland 2010 History Lessons, Pein Fine Arts, Beijing, China 2009 Niubi Newbie Kids II Exhibition, Schoeni Art Gallery, Hong Kong, China 2009 Journey of A Thousand Miles–2009 CAFA Excellent Graduation Works Exhibition, CAFA Art Museum, Beijing, China 2009 Young Artists Promotional Exhibition — 2009 Beijing 798 Festival , Beijing 798 Art Zone, Beijing, China 2009 CAFA Graduation Works Exhibition, China Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing, China 2009 Cograda Word Design Congress 2009 Beijing , CAFA Art Museum, Beijing, China
