PROFILE Liu Zhuoquan
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F
Liu Zhuoquan
or those of us who lived through an 80s childhood,
the notion of a viper’s pit is a cinematic one. The snake
pit was a key device in the exploits of screen hero
Indiana Jones, and the spectacle of writhing serpents
never failed to elicit a collective chill amidst a dimmed room of
huddled children. Paired with the soothing whirr of the VCR fan, the
idea of drowning in snakes was a quasi-horror, a thrilling precursor
to supper and Chinese-whispers after lights out. But for young
children such as Liu Zhuoquan, growing up in the political hotbed
of 1960s China, the snake was not a pop-cultural figment and
being Chinese was no game, it was a somnambulist terror.
of the forbidden laboratory site. References to pharmacology are
omnipresent throughout Liu’s oeuvre as the bottles he uses invoke
medicine – pharmacy tonics or self-medication via alcohol.
Liu Zhuoquan is a rising international star and his work Where
are you? (2012) is the talk of the 18th Biennale of Sydney. This
installation is made of 1800 recycled glass bottles of varying scale
and shape, each module carefully hand-painted to convincingly
suggest a segment of a snake’s body. Collectively arranged, the
bottles give the impression of a coil of black snakes teeming across
the floors and pillars of the Museum of Contemporary Art.
Liu’s childhood was dramatically ruptured in 1970 when he was six.
His father was a factory manager and a man with an elementary
school education. As the Cultural Revolution swept the country
and he failed to join the Communist Party, the family members
were identified as potential agitators and forcibly relocated to the
countryside. Liu declines to elaborate on these painful years, but it
is clear that life was anything but bucolic.
Where are you? is a powerful and moving expression of personal
trauma. The mineral interiors of Liu’s bottles convey a dark void – a
ropeable beast, sealed tightly within, yet threatening to escape. The
latent menace that it posits exudes the anxieties of a generation
who have endured vast lateral shifts from the poverty and
iconoclasm of the Cultural Revolution, to the economic opening
up of China during the late 1980s and its crescendo in the heady
capitalism of modern-day urban dwelling.
Among his memories from this passage are two encounters with
snakes. Both times he stumbled upon the reptiles surreptitiously
hidden in crevices; once in a classroom and another time in the
mountains. Neither glimpse revealed the snake in its entirety and
Liu’s terror has never been quelled. He tells us: “What is unseen
and unknown assumes imagined fear.” The reptile is a symbol of
abject fear for Liu: a missing head and tail are analogous for duress.
Liu was born in Wuhan, Hubei Province in 1964. His practice spans
painting, photography, film and sculpture but he is best known for
collections of bottles painted with exquisite and convincing realism.
Story Sarah Vanderpeer
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Liu’s proclivity for glass bottles dates to early childhood. The
family home was near a university chemistry department and he
recalls an early affection for the specimen bottles as well as a fear
Liu regards his practice as a form of catharsis. With the precision
of a surgeon, he uses his work to incise and heal. “My recent
body of work – the bottle painting series – reveals the developing
phenomenon of current China. I liken it to a human body and
strategic surgical medical practice. My aim is to use a traditional
technique but while doing so to reveal and also strip away issues of
personal, social and cultural importance.”
The European Enlightenment impulse to categorise and contain
was perhaps an attempt to grasp and explain the world, and Liu’s
early practice, too, is defined by this archival tendency. The ‘World
of Thousands’ series, shown at Art Stage Singapore in 2011,
consisted of rows of uniform-scale bottles sensitively painted with
medical and botanical imagery. Each bottle was replete with a
miniature image of an article of clothing, a body part or a forlorn
object such as a loose button. Evoking the specimen shelves of
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the laboratory and the ramshackle objects of a market, Liu posed
a complex world view. Suturing Western systems of taxonomy,
which are based on delineation and categorisation, with a Buddhist
tendency to understand the world holistically, he attempted to
describe the world via a library of images.
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Liu is among a second generation of Chinese contemporary artists
who have forsaken the cynical tropes of political pop in favour of
an introspective visual language, one that rewards quietude and
technical acuity. He is a skillful practitioner of a folk-art tradition that
he looks to both interrogate and elevate.
Liu’s work and his technique is pregnant with cultural memory.
He has adapted the laborious artisanal craft of snuff bottle or
‘neihua’ painting whereby bent, longhaired brushes are used to
painstakingly render motifs on the interior of bottles. The tradition
behind this technique is one that reflects the caprice and sometime
iconoclasm of modern Chinese history.
The ‘inside painting’ technique dates back to the Qing Dynasty
in China when it was used by craftsmen to decorate ornamental
snuff bottles. With the onset of the communist regime, Chinese
society and traditions were ruptured and artisanal crafts such
as snuff bottle painting were forbidden as part of an attempt to
expunge material expressions of wealth or status. In recent times,
the technique has experienced resurgence as commodity culture
has burgeoned in China, and has been adapted by impoverished
artisans trying to eke out a living from the tourist trade.
Breaking with convention, Liu ornaments discarded bottles with
irregular shapes. Even raw, these vessels convey the tensions
inherent within Chinese society. Many of the bottles are embossed
with liquor logos; they are often culled from the streets around
his studio near the 798 art district on the edge of urban Beijing.
Otherwise they are salvaged after a night of drinking with friends.
These discarded forms speak of the mass waste that litters many
an inner city gutter with decadent abandon.
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On first impression the monochrome interior of the bottles in Where
are you? suggests a restrained classical sensibility. The liquescent
residue of the top of the bottles where stippled paint gives way
PROFILE Liu Zhuoquan
With the onset of the communist
regime, Chinese society and
traditions were ruptured and
artisanal crafts such as snuff
bottle painting were forbidden to
expunge material expressions
of wealth or status.
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to transparency of the glass rims echoes the formal qualities of the
mist-shrouded hills that we see in traditional scholar paintings. By
contrast, the lustrous exterior of glass bottles evokes the glaze of
shop facades of the mega malls that dominate the Beijing landscape
with a pacifying ubiquity. Their pearly surface qualities emulate the
glitzy visual language of present-day Chinese urban society.
Although Liu insists his practice is predominantly introspective, the
city where he works informs the themes of his works. Destruction
and development surrounds him in Beijing – a shifting landscape
where little prevails thanks to 24-hour construction and a
cannibalistic hunger for expansion. The tender desire to record
ephemeral objects and nightmarish beats is part of the psychosis
of dwelling in a rapidly changing urban context.
There is something dark, too, suggested by the collective imagery
of Liu’s more recent installations. Liu says: “In China, the word
‘independence’ has a special meaning. Independent thinking and
individual behaviour has a potentially confronting meaning when
living in a collective society and absolute political centered nation.”
Like Indiana Jones, Liu Zhuoquan is an intellectual maverick
seeking a greater truth. “I regard Chinese society as an arena for my
art to experiment within,” he says. “Any subject, domestic, political,
cultural, historic is a topic for me to use and be inspired by.”
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01Where are you? (detail), 2012, glass bottles, oil paint, Chinese paint and sealing wax, variable dimensions;
installation view of the 18th Biennale of Sydney at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia; photo: Ben
Symons
02 Fallen sparrow, 2012, explosion-proof light globes, wire, mineral colour installation, dimensions variable
03 Broken Finger,2010, 28 glass bottles and mineral pigments, 98 x 64 x 12cm
Courtesy the artist and China Art Projects, Beijing