Liu Bolin and the Theme of Invisibility

Can a person disappear in plain sight? That's the question Liu Bolin's remarkable work seems to ask. The Beijing-based artist is sometimes called "The Invisible Man" because in nearly all his art, Bolin is front and center — and completely unseen. He aims to draw attention to social and political issues by dissolving into the background.

Reference: Liu Bolin: The invisible man.

Artist Liu Bolin began his "Hiding in the City" series in 2005, after Chinese police destroyed Suo Jia Cun, the Beijing artists' village in which he'd been working, because the government did not want artists working and living together. With the help of assistants, he painstakingly painted his clothes, face, and hair to blend into the background of a demolished studio. 

Since then, the so-called "Invisible Man" has photographed himself fading into a variety of backgrounds all over Beijing. Spot him embedded in a Cultural Revolution slogan painted on a wall, or spy him within tiers of supermarket shelves stocked with soft drinks. Just as with Bolin himself, the contradictions and confusing narratives of China's post-Cultural Revolution society are often hiding in plain sight.

Reference: Liu Bolin: Artist.

From these remarkable works by Bolin, I associate to very different notions of invisibility.  First, Invisible Man, a novel by Ralph Ellison, speaks to the struggle for group and individual identity, in the midst of discrimination and disavowal.

Second, in the Wall Street Journal article Behold the Appearance of the Invisibility Cloak, we learn how things appear or become visible: that is, through the bouncing of light from those things to our eyes.  But physicists, based on General Theory of Relativity, can bend light around things, essentially making them invisible.

Third, the film Hollow Man tells the story of young scientists playing around in the lab and coming up with an invisibility serum.  What happens is the stuff of boyhood fantasy and crime novels.

So where does Bolin and this theme of invisibility take me?

Let's see.