Liu Yue’s Immersive Installation at C-Space+Local

State of the Arts is our regular arts column whereby we take a look at the newest moves in Beijing's creative scene and highlight art news as well as exhibitions, artists, and openings that you should seek out.

Just last year, Caochangdi stalwart C-Space joined forces with Space Local, an art practice space formerly nestled in the Hongyuan Apartment complex, on the edge of 798. The result is the newly renamed C-Space+Local, a mixture of conventional gallery space and open-ended platform to be used as the starting point for generating content for exhibitions. Currently on view until Mar 11 is OWL, an immersive, site-specific installation by Shanghai-based artist Liu Yue.

OWL: C-Space's immersive, site-specific installation by Shanghai-based artist Liu Yue

With a body of work centered around painting and photography but branching off into sculpture, the 2017 Huayu Youth Award-shortlisted artist explores how our cognitive habits distort our assessment of objects and images. This exhibit is the unofficial follow-up to the 37-year-old artist's work, "The Gentle Slope" (2015), in which wooden lattices propped up in the cramped gallery confines become nodes of suspension that eventually cave in under pressure. For OWL, the artist used locally sourced scrap materials to minutely lay out a trail of light within the space, to which end he holed himself up in the gallery for a fortnight. This results in makeshift contraptions which Liu calls, “Derivations of the space,” built from mannequin heads, rice cookers, discarded tires, school textbooks, or just plain rubble, interspersed with (shards of) mirrors. Just like owl eyes, these precariously balanced structures form constellations that reflect the glaring light, weaving together an endlessly repeating net of rays.

Liu's further attempts at capturing light’s untraceable iridescence can be gauged from the photos and painting in the upstairs room. The latter, entitled "Cognitive Studies – Letting Gain Come Infinitely Close to Itself – Light" (2006-2017), took the artist 10 years to complete by arduously applying polychromatic (‘mother of pearl’) acrylic paint onto the canvas. One imagines he applied the same meditative focus to his guerilla-like configuration of the space, struggling to harness his luminous subject. To the artist, light is a beguiling vehicle for detail that determines how we engage with our surroundings. As light travels throughout the space, the viewer’s head swivels to retain it with jittery apprehension, as if trying to track the ever-shifting tally lights on TV studio cameras.

Shards of mirrors create a linear thread through Liu Yue's work

However, unlike the light-sensitive booby-traps in Indiana Jones: Raiders of the Lost Ark, this sequence of refractions does not signal an impending collapse; instead, the shattered mirrors strewn about hint at the timeless presence of light, witness to some erstwhile devastation. Only after a paranoia-fueled perusal of the space is the viewer ultimately able to retrace the source of the light, in whose subscript we find traces of mundane lives, which seem to have been lived ages prior to our own.

The disquietingly gleaming debris inadvertently echoes the fickle, ruinous landscape in which Beijing’s art community is forced to maneuver. As recently as last summer, the sleepy hamlet of Caochangdi saw its much-loved artist co-op IOWA go under as the government’s crackdown on migrant workers sparked a collateral wave of evictions in the area. Perhaps of little comfort, Liu’s scintillating set-up reminds us that matter is what we make of it, and as owls residing among the rubble we should keep looking over our shoulders for a glimmer of light.

Head over to Red Brick Yard No. 1 this weekend to see this show (ideally after dark), as C-Space+Local is set to close for Spring Festival from Feb 12 through Feb 26.

Photos: Sid Gulinck

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