For centuries and centuries, visual artists have sought to depict the external world using the internally functioning eye ball. Due to this process, and this distinction between the external and internal, there has always been a difference between the painter and the painted. There has always been a difference between the artist and his creation – for the artist has always stood aloof from his work, leaving his creation to the winds of fate and judgment once he has finished it. Leaving it perhaps, to its own free will, and the inherit worth and genius he has put into it. Of course, this distinction, the cause of so much confusion and suffering in the world, is a very Western concept. It mirrors the events described in the book Genesis. So every western artist sought to be a God in his own right. In Eastern religion, however, there is no such distinction between internal and external – the symbol of the yin/yang shows us that there is a little bit of both elements encapsulated in the other, and that in the end, they are complementary parts of an Entire, Whole Process called the “Tao,” or the “way” that energy flows through time. It should only be expected then, that an artist who demolishes the border or boundary separating creator and created should hail from China.

Liu Bolin paints himself into everyday spaces: into the side of a graffitied building, a traffic barrier, a pile of rubble, an aisle at the supermarket, or an ordinary brick wall. He is meticulously painted into the background of these spaces and places. Once he is painted into them, he sits, or stands, or lays, perfectly still – just long enough to have an assistant take the photograph of “his” image – and also, perhaps, just long enough to trip out the few lucky Chinese people who happen to pass him by. Although, he intends that these passer-by’s do not see him at all, for what this artist seeks to do is disappear. The Chinese artist obliterates his ego and becomes one with spaces we normally ignore, or see merely in the periphery – those marginalized spaces of our visual field. The work of Liu represents many ideas; he himself says he is most interested in the social upheavals caused by industrial development in urban China. However, what fascinates me about Liu’s work most is the idea of nothingness – or of blending into space itself – of being invisible to the external world – of being unnoticed- and yet, still existing – still being there despite recognition or acknowledgment. His art is the representation of the Holy Spirit, or maybe an example of Plato’s Forms – proving that even supposedly inert, insentient matter DOES in fact have a life of its own.

Finally, the aspect of his art which suggests his total disappearance, or the obliteration of his personality and ego is what leads me, as an observer, to a kind of nirvana. It is in this disappearance that unity it achieved, and it is in this unity that we finally find the peace we long for as human beings. In a post modern time when there is no art, and when so called artists rarely hit their mark, finally we come across one who can be called an artist, and who is serving his function as an artist – by leading his audience, viewers, and entire external reality into a kind of meditative bliss.