Liu Yujia

Black Ocean

2016

Black Ocean, 2016 (Still)

Black Ocean by Liu Yujia portrays a desert landscape in a state of both destruction and construction, revealing the desert’s simultaneous fragility and indestructibility. The structure of the storytelling of this film was inspired by Italian writer Italo Calvino’s novel, Invisible Cities (1972). Several chapters from the book are interwoven in the film incorporating the discussions of cities and landscapes narrated by Marco Polo and Kublai Khan in the novel. Their debate provides a window through which the viewer may enter, wander, get lost, and find an exit, or do several of these at the same time.

The artist describes the work as that which “looks at the fragility and resilience of the spectacles built and destroyed by humans.” The great expanses of desert, subject to industrial processes are rendered strange and absurd under the wide angles of Liu Yuji’s lens.

Artist Liu Yujia’s practice revolves mainly around video and photography. Exploring the boundary between the real and the virtual, with objects, time, space and landscapes reconstructed and narrated in fragments, a common situational experience emerges. It is from here that we might imagine and discuss the human condition. Meditative and fixated on symbolic objects which become characters in themselves, much of Liu Yujia’s work takes place in the absence of humans where only their spectral presence can be felt.

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Liu Yujia Black Ocean

Liu Yujia

Black Ocean