Meet the artist-explorer Liu Chuang
He tackles bitcoin mining and engineered nature in his ambitious installations
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Nestled in the Shanghai suburb of Songjiang, Liu Chuang’s studio is piled to the rafters with neatly organized books. Maps of various scales hang on the wall. Among the many charts and diagrams stuck to the shelves, I also spot a periodic table of elements. This scholarly setting recalls the office of a historian or a geographer more than an artist’s studio – and yet, over the past few years, Liu’s work has impressed the Chinese art milieu with an ever more interdisciplinary speculative practice that spans video, sculpture, and installation. Employing an expansive web of references that continuously stretches the discursive framework of his own work, the artist has also challenged the limits of Chinese contemporary art as a whole.

Liu’s early work is underscored by a kind of romantic quality and a latent archeological interest. In Buying Everything on You (2005–) – the first work that earned the artist international attention, and secured his participation in the New Museum’s first triennial, ‘Younger than Jesus’ (2009) – Liu approached migrants job-hunting in a Shenzhen labor market and asked them if he could buy their belongings. The artist then exhibited the purchased objects in the museum as stand-ins for the people he had met, a searing commentary on the implementation of capitalist ideology and the distribution of resources in post-socialist China. Love Story (2008–2014) consists of thousands of bootleg romance novels from the 1980s and 1990s that the artist purchased from a rundown bookshop in Dongguan, a city close to Shenzhen, home to countless migrant workers. Most valuable to Liu was not the nostalgic value of these vintage copies, but the way the migrant workers had used them as communication tools by scrawling notes in the margins, years before the dawn of mass digital media.
The decision to migrate is always based on the tension between individual agency and socioeconomic flows. Liu’s relocation to Shanghai in 2017 was his own proactive response to an increasingly precarious condition in Beijing. (Since 2017, an urban planning campaign aimed at ‘removing Beijing’s non-capital functions and features’ has resulted in the forced demolition of many artist studios). The three-channel video Bitcoin Mining and Field Recordings of Ethnic Minorities (2018) – shown at this year's Dhaka Art Summit – is Liu’s most ambitious project to date, one in which he weaves seemingly disparate research findings into a grand speculative thesis on the underlying patterns of human civilization.
Liu incorporates these affinities – together with a dizzying array of references to political and sociotechnical systems throughout history – into a wild trip in media ecology. Among the many threads in this 40-minute video is a montage of infrastructure projects, from the introduction of telegraphs in China during the late Qing Dynasty and the proliferation of dams in the mid-20th century to contemporary railway, digital, and Bitcoin networks. The second half of the work grows increasingly speculative, as the marketing of an all-in-one entertainment system (named EVD) to Zomian peoples in the early 21st century is compared to the human-alien communication carried out via light and sound in Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977). The video ends with a montage of women in traditional ethnic dress morphing into the Star Wars character Padmé Amidala wearing a similar costume on the central channel, while Planet Solaris (a nod to Andrei Tarkovsky) rotates on the other two.

Liu Chuang is represented by Antenna Space, Shanghai and Magician Space, Beijing.
Chuang will be participating in ‘INFORMATION (Today)’, a group exhibition scheduled to open on May 29, 2020 at Kunsthalle Basel.
Alvin Li is an author and curator based in Shanghai.
Top image: Liu Chuang, Bitcoin Mining and Field Recordings of Ethnic Minorities, 2018. Commissioned for ‘Cosmopolis #1.5 : Enlarged Intelligence’, with the support of the Mao Jihong Arts Foundation. Installation view at National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, Taipei. Courtesy of the artist and Antenna Space, Shanghai.