Presenting:
Black Ocean, 2016
Single channel film
Color, Sound
38’35”
About the artwork
Black Ocean pictures the human landscape destroyed as well as in construction, and its fragility as well as indestructibility. The structure of storytelling of this film is inspired by the novel Invisible Cities (1972) of Italian writer Italo Calvino. Several chapters are interwoven with the debate and inquiry raised by Marco Polo and Kublai Khan about their imagined city and landscape in this film. It provides an entrance to allow the audience to get in, to wander, to get lost, and to find an exit or several ones somewhere at some time.
Artist statement
This is an urban industrial spectacle built by the monopolized resource industry, and naturally a place of extremely monetary value. Being established in the local gebi desert and yardang landform, it makes an immense and surreal film set aesthetics come into being. What’s in the lens are all real, only seem to be rather absurd.
Machines and animals are serialized in such areas constructed by humans, and this mechanic and unnatural system created the present situation there. People in the shoot are only shadows and signs, functional beings operating drilling platform, machines and vehicles, of no significance in this vast natural industrial landscape and a huge persistently-running system. They are dressed in the same uniform and show their appearance in groups as streams of ants, with no face identifiable in every shoot.
This work looks into the fragility and resilience of those spectacles built and destroyed by humans, presenting a primitive, gloomy, meanwhile peaceful, even hallucinogenic phantom place of its one foot rooted in the distant past, and another marching toward a far future.
About artist
Liu Yujia was born in Sichuan Province in 1981. She graduated from Sichuan Fine Arts Institute in 2004 and got her Master’s Degree in London College of Communication, University of the Arts London in 2009. She currently lives and works in Beijing.
Liu Yulia’s practice mostly involves videos and photographs, exploring the boundary between real and virtual, with object, time, space and landscape reconstructed and narrated in fragments into a certain situational experience in common, hence to imagine and discuss the human condition.
Recent exhibitions include:
Liu Yujia Solo Exhibition: The beach，a fantasy, Tang Contemporary Art Center, Beijing , 2017；Re-Image Programme / Liu Yujia: The Third Man, The Inna Art Space, Hangzhou, 2016; Liu Yujia Solo Exhibition: Vertigo, Tang Contemporary Art Center, Beijing , 2016; Liu Yujia Solo Exhibition: The Third Man, Shanghai Gallery of Art, Shanghai, 2015;
Selected group exhibition:
Material and charting，Art Museum of Nanjing University of the Arts，Nanjing（2018）；Screen Refreshing／Labor， Art Museum of Nanjing University of the Arts，Nanjing（2018）；Frontier：Re－assessment of Post－Globalisational Politics, OCAT，Shanghai（2017）； Resurrection-The Regeneration of Strongholds, Surplus Space, Wuhan (2017)；A Chemical Love Story，Tang Contemporary Art Beijing, Beijing, (2017)；On Drawing: Visibility of Power, J Gallery, Shanghai (2017); Why Not Ask Again? – Maneuvers, Disputations & Stories，11th Shanghai biennale，PSA，Shanghai（2016）；New Order: altermondialism，Just Space，Edition Hotel, Sanya (2016);Take me out, chi K11 Art Museum, Shanghai, 2016; The Image Expression In the Art Practice of New Generation, Xi’an Art Museum, Xi’an,2016; Community of Celibates, Shanghai Gallery of Art, Shanghai, 2016; Moving Image programme ， OCT Contemporary Art Terminal ， Shanghai ， 2015; De arrogantie van de jeugd, Galerie Gabriel Rolt，Amsterdam，The Netherlands (2015); The System of Objects, Minsheng Art Museum, Shanghaib (2015); City Pavilion, The 10th Shanghai Biennale 2014, Shanghai (2015)
