Love Story
2014 - Installation (Installation)
Liu Chuang
Categorized as low-level literature, a “Love Stories” book is a romantic popular fiction of proletariat China, read mainly by teenagers, students, and young workers. These novels were mostly written by Taiwanese and Hong Kong writers in the 1980s to the 1990s to meet the cultural needs of the new social classes before being imported into China after the Chinese economic reform in the late 1980s. As contemporary China industry developed, a large number of workers became readers of this new pulp fiction. Artist Liu Chuan purchased about 20,000 Love Stories books from a run-down book rental shop in the booming industrial Dongguan, a factory city located in the Pearl River Delta where he used to live and where most of the working population were migrating to from around the country. Here Love Story only presents about 3,000 used pulp fiction novels rented or borrowed by migrant workers, and the anonymous handwritten notes accumulated within them. Some notes look like letter drafts or rather internal monologues while other appear as diaries or poems. Love Story can be seen as a portrait of a generation of migrant workers in China, from 1990 to 2010, an important transitional period in China both economically and politically.
Known for engaging socio-economic matters as they relate to urban realities, Liu Chuang proposes different understandings of social systems underlying the everyday. Through grim humor and often poetic approach, Liu Chuang often works with ready-mades and interventions across various mediums from video, installation, architecture to performance. Liu Chuang works have integrated social intervention with institutional critique to examine China’s immediate realities, particularly the Shanzhai phenomenon of piracy and plagiarism in mass manufacturing and culture.
Colors:
Related works sharing similar palette
© » SLASH PARIS
Météo des forêts — La MABA — Exhibition — Slash Paris Login Newsletter Twitter Facebook Météo des forêts — La MABA — Exhibition — Slash Paris English Français Home Events Artists Venues Magazine Videos Back Météo des forêts Exhibition Film, installation, mixed media Upcoming Julien Prévieux et Virginie Yassef, L’Arbre, 2009 — Image : Élie Godard Film Super 8 transféré sur DVD — 7 min 18 — Ed 4 + 2 Courtesy des artistes Météo des forêts In about 1 month: January 18 → April 7, 2024 La MABA présente, du 18 janvier au 7 avril 2024, Météo des forêts : une exposition collective réunissant des travaux d’artistes de diverses générations travaillant différents médiums (dessin, photographie, vidéo, sculpture, installation…)...
© » KADIST
Kudzanai-Violet Hwami
2019This painting is the direct result of the artist’s research into her roots...
© » ARTS EQUATOR
Austrian singer collaborates with ‘angklung’ musicians at Indonesian Cultural Night in Vienna (via The Jakarta Post) | ArtsEquator Thinking and Talking about Arts and Culture in Southeast Asia ArtsEquator Radar July 10, 2018 Angklung musicians featuring Austrian soprano Maria Theresia Gruber staged the song Bengawan Solo at the Indonesian Cultural Night event held at Vienna’s Weltmuseum on Tuesday evening...
© » KADIST
Taysir Batniji
2006Fathers #18 and Fathers #27 is part of a series of photographs and videos made in recent years in Gaza...
© » KADIST
Sancintya Mohini Simpson
2019And words were whispered by Sancintya Mohini Simpson is a series of ten works on paper based on the lived experiences of Indian women taken to the Natal region of South Africa from the 1860s to the early 1900s to work in tea and sugarcane plantations during apartheid, which included servitude in its broadest and most sinister definition...
© » KADIST
Shahab Fotouhi
2013Shahab Fotouhi’s photographic series Establishing Shot; Interior, Night – Exterior, Day; without Antagonist and Extra consists of four C-prints that at first glance would appear to be travel posters for Iran, in that each features a beautifully shot image of an Iranian waterfall...
