In his works, he states the temporary nature of the universe and searches for the great mysterious forces
At Marmomac, Liuhao and Mr. Nick from Stone White company have a booth in Hall 8, A12-13.
“I want to show the people that everything we see in front of us is only temporary,” Chinese artist Liuhao writes us in an email. At the Xiamen Stone Fair 2023, at the booth of the Stone White company, 2 of his works caught our eye: one was called “Continental drift: A Poet’s Conjecture,“ which recreated the movement of the continental plates with a table of movable marble parts.
The other was titled “Endless Loop. Praise of the Earth“ (Endlose Schleife. Lob der Erde) and featured 6 panels with mountainous marble surfaces on which twisted metal rods were laid out. The surfaces recreated regions in the Rocky Mountains, the Himalya and the Tian Shan (also: Tengri-Tagh or Tengir-Too) in northern China and around, and the metal symbolized the receding and continuing deformation of the earth’s crust.
White marble is the material of the company Stone White, which buys and resells it around the world.
“I have always been curious and puzzled about the world we live in“ the artist, born in 1995, writes to us.
In many of his works, he packs his confusion about the world into contrasts: in “Landscape“, he makes xuanpaper (rice paper) look rock-hard; in “Copper“, he makes the metal deform as if in waves.
Liuhao has his mental home somewhere between worlds. “I feel that there are more mysterious forces controlling everything outside of the world we live in,” he writes.
And on his working method, “I decompose, deconstruct, twist, and reconstruct substance, using time to record a balance and rhythm of life that may exist in reality, which exists in the real world beyond the reach of our eyes.“
In our conversations at the show and emails afterwards, however, he did not seem to us to be an esotericist. Rather, he persistently asks those questions that other people eventually push aside.
He came to art through his family. A relative is among the important collectors of contemporary art in China, and introduced him to artists and their thinking. “Later, I met my wife, who encouraged me to become myself and become a professional artist.“
Where he searches so much for the unseen in his work, we naturally had to ask what his next subject is.
“How we return to the universe in the form of dust,“ was his answer.
(13.09.2023, 09.13.2023)
