Liu Ding

Executed in 2006, this work is number 1 out of an edition of 3

This work is generally in good condition overall.
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LIU DING

Liu Ding, one of the most aesthetically uncompromising participants in recent tendencies toward interventionist practice, is best known for his work in the manufacturing of social situations and implicitly critical diagrams of relationships and interactions within the art world. Through a range of archetypal functions of objects and systems—the store, the factory, the conversation—the artist manipulates and attempts to reveal the occasionally hidden signs and structures that underlie processes of value creation and addition, increasingly with reference to the machinations of commercial and discursive aspects of the production of art. He employs minimalism as a visual mode rather than a rigorous set of conceptual movements, stripping away many of the regional and cultural signifiers that mark his particular studio mode while transforming the trace of localized identity into reductive visual components.

Focusing particularly on the absurd, Liu Ding develops these irregular outliers into microcosms of broader systemic contradiction, drawing on discursive methodologies to populate highly engineered structures of architecture, text, line, color, and graphic. He has also appropriated positions external to studio practice, acting at various junctures as an artistic director of a major exhibition space, an editor of an art periodical, a curator of independent exhibitions, and, perhaps most significantly, a convener of collective moments for projects ranging from artist groups to critical forums. His work increasingly reflects these aspects of artistic creation from within rather than as supplementary roles; over the past six years his practice has turned from more typically spatial pursuits and minimal forms to the linguistic, self-reflexive, and relational.

On this axis of transformation from actionist principles to conversational engineering, It's a War! (Lot 936) occupies a fundamental position in its approach to the notion of circulation made solid and visible. Sixty electric blue metal lamps of the sort installed outdoors in order to kill insects are installed on a metal frame six units tall and ten units long, creating an imposing wall more than two and a half meters high that towers over the viewer while emitting a discomfiting buzzing and glow. To one side some 30 plastic devices of similar function but in the shape of handheld rackets sit waiting in a trashcan, their many colors and manageable scale offering a tempting alternative to the terrifying architecture of sound and energy just steps away. This is indubitably an urban form, one that—commissioned for an exhibition that purported to explore the effects of evolving streetscapes and city cultures on the psychology of the artist as citizen—presents a bleak and violent vision of Beijing in the years leading up to the Olympics.

Despite this harsh environment constructed by the opposition of tools or weapons offered to the viewer, however, the work is notable in that its inherent tension is actually internally contradictory: both the rackets and the wall are intended to fight off a common enemy, as if Liu Ding wished to seduce with his installation and then send out his foot soldiers freshly armed. Formally the work anticipates slacker minimalism with reference to the consumerist array, touching upon the display cultures of visual merchandising that would enter the artist's vocabulary in his later series related to the transactions of shopping—and the place of art therein. As an installation the experience is almost impressionistic, capturing the droning violence of the city without explicit reference to anything but the single and repeated oblique form of the insect electric chair. Liu Ding thus imagines an alternate society of animality, drawing analogies between hunter and hunted by subjecting his human interlocutors to the discursive violence of urban space reinvented here. The project makes present and solid the mobile and circulatory sensations from which it is conceived, insisting on the possibility of social action that would become evident in the directly conversational situations of the artist's work to come.