Photographs by an artist renowned for disappearing into his artworks have gone on display. Chinese performance artist Liu Bolin, known as the Invisible Man, began this series in 2005.
ADVERTISEMENTPhotographs by an artist renowned for disappearing into his artworks have gone on display in Milan on Wednesday.
Chinese performance artist Liu Bolin, known as the Invisible Man, began this series in 2005.
It all started when government authorities dismantled Bolin's hometown Suojia Village, and the artist used body painting to fully integrate himself into the rubble of his former neighbourhood.
His aim, he says, was to push people to think about the relationship between man and nature and between thinking and political power.
The resulting series, called Hiding in the City, mixed different forms of contemporary art including performance, body painting and photography, earning Bodin worldwide recognition.
Of his new series, Hiding in Italy, he said: "At my beginning I do the protest in China because of a lot of different things that happened in China. In Italy it's a different meaning, because of Italians have a long heritage of culture."
Instead of protesting against the destruction of the past, in Italy Bolin was able to "disappear" among the seats of Milan's La Scala opera house, merge into the ancient walls of the Colosseum and hide behind the works of Caravaggio at the Galleria Borghese.
"I think about all the time why I want to do this, in one word I think about the things made by humans themselves. I want to find a potential link between the humans to the things the humans made," he says.