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
The Only Question Is How to Endure. Works from Towards Evenings: Six Chapters
Dates: 10.3.2018-27.5.2018 Opening hours: 10:00-17:00(closed on Mondays) Location: OCAT Xi’an Address: Beichitou 1st Road, Yanta District, Xi’an, China Website: official web page
The Only Question Is How to Endure180*180*10cm 2012-2017
Since 2012, the artist Chen Zhe has started her long term project Towards Evenings: Six Chapters, talking about individual inner feelings toward the surroundings, especially confusions and fears upon the unknowns occurred when one looking at the dusk. In fact, Chen Zhe has already begun to discover the human inner perceptions in her early works. Behind those pain, fright and indulgence, according to Chen Zhe, there is something beautiful, or precisely, they all mix together one and another. And this is the feature of all the works from Towards Evenings: Six Chapters.
Chen Zhe Timing Installation 2017
This exhibition presents works of different materials and media like photography, archiving pictures and installations, in which one video will be exhibited the first time.
Chen Zhe was born in 1989, graduated from Art Center College of Design in 2011, now she lives and works in Beijing. Her works have been exhibited in the 11th Shanghai Biennale, in Sadie Coles Gallery in London, Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing and Minsheng Art Museum in Shanghai. She has received Kassel Photobook Award, Inge Morath Award from Magnum Foundation and has participated in the shootings of documentary films of the French channel ARTE and Japanese channel NHK.
