Love Story
Liu Chuang
刘窗
Production date
2014
Object Detail
Media
found books, coloured stones, and hand-drawn inscriptions on wall
Measurements
dimensions variable
Notes
Liu Chuang describes himself as ‘art interventionist acting in the public space’. In 2005 he started a business called the Picabia Decoration Company Ltd – named after the Dada artist - manufacturing decorative paintings to order. Liu says, ‘The company was founded with a Dongguan artist, Li Jinghu. It wasn't an art project – the goal was to make money. The company produces decoration items for home and hotels. It lasted for a year. Though it received a lot of attention, it never succeeded in selling one piece of merchandise. So it went bankrupt. This process is like a work by a dada artist.’ Coming of age in the late 1990s he witnessed the unprecedented industrial and urban transformation of a globalising China, and his practice naturally interacts with the ever-evolving and disconcerting environment of the manufacturing heartland of the Pearl River Delta. Often, Liu Chuang gathers and ‘curates’ specific personal details in performances and installations that reveal the voices of the multitude of individual secret lives, dreams and daily routines, revealing in the meantime the infrastructures of contemporary society. In his work Buy Everything on You, for example, Liu Chuang displays personal belongings sold to him by a stranger, right down to clothes, underwear, cell phone, identity cards and family snapshots.
‘Love Story’ consists of hundreds used pulp fiction novels rented or borrowed by migrant workers in boomtown Dongguan, in the Pearl River Delta, and the anonymous notes accumulated within them. What Liu Chuang calls ‘Love Stories’ includes the romantic popular fiction of proletarian China, read mainly by teenagers, students, and (mostly female) young workers. This literature could be rented and circulated very cheaply and had the largest readership in mainland China by 2010. Rarely translated into other languages, these books were mainly circulated within China. As if the notes made by the Love Story readers – letters, diaries, contact details, phone numbers, lists and memos and doodles – were written directly to him, Chuang has culled them to be translated and painted onto the gallery walls. While the love stories are often written in a Taiwanese dialect, its readers are from mainland China and speak a different vernacular of Mandarin. Their notations reveal their identities – background, gender and place. Thus, the language acts as a kind of portrait. Liu Chuang is interested in understated and idiosyncratic meanings of mainstream language, the way it interacts as a palimpsest in the public sphere. More, the inaccuracies and transfigurations that occur through the act of translation. Like a micro network or an analogue internet, users comment individually and do not engage with one another—there is no mutual communication.
‘Love Story’ consists of hundreds used pulp fiction novels rented or borrowed by migrant workers in boomtown Dongguan, in the Pearl River Delta, and the anonymous notes accumulated within them. What Liu Chuang calls ‘Love Stories’ includes the romantic popular fiction of proletarian China, read mainly by teenagers, students, and (mostly female) young workers. This literature could be rented and circulated very cheaply and had the largest readership in mainland China by 2010. Rarely translated into other languages, these books were mainly circulated within China. As if the notes made by the Love Story readers – letters, diaries, contact details, phone numbers, lists and memos and doodles – were written directly to him, Chuang has culled them to be translated and painted onto the gallery walls. While the love stories are often written in a Taiwanese dialect, its readers are from mainland China and speak a different vernacular of Mandarin. Their notations reveal their identities – background, gender and place. Thus, the language acts as a kind of portrait. Liu Chuang is interested in understated and idiosyncratic meanings of mainstream language, the way it interacts as a palimpsest in the public sphere. More, the inaccuracies and transfigurations that occur through the act of translation. Like a micro network or an analogue internet, users comment individually and do not engage with one another—there is no mutual communication.
Accession number
2015.254