Liu Guangguang was born in China’s Gansu province. He attended Lu Xun Academy of Fine Art. He lives and works in Shenyang and Beijing. He’s a member of the Beijing-based EDGE Creative Collective.
His recent work is about scale. His figures (and animals) go about their normal activity. They check their phones. They play cards. They get ready for bed. The people smile without a care in the world. Despite the normalcy of each image, something’s unusual, if not wrong. Either the figures have miniature heads or else their bodies are gigantic. Their fingers and necks are elongated. A few have huge eyes. One woman has the floppy ears and trunk of an elephant.
The disparities of scale aren’t so jarring because all the figures have similar distortions. The space, however, is. Seated at the end of a room, up against a wall, a dog’s bed hovers above the ground. The space seems wonky, as if the intersection of floor, wall, and ceiling don’t line up. Some of the figures are shown in extreme foreshortening. The point of view of the most striking piece is from the bottom of a staircase. There’s a foreshortened man that looks like a giant. A woman’s dress blows up over her head, exposing her breasts. A massive guy talks to a tiny guy. There’s a severed head half way up the stairs.
There’s narrative here, somewhere. Something about identity, about finding one’s place in a world that is either too big or too small. In a world that is not a particularly nice place. There’s no sense of alienation in the work. There can’t be, because each figure, one way or another, has been dealt the same hand. The figures don’t struggle with their quest. They simply deal with the obstacles they meet along the way.
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