Liu Chuang (b. 1978 Hubei, China) is an art interventionist acting in the public space who challenges our perception of everyday life details and usual patterns. Exploring social rules, he plays along with them in order to disrupt the conventional status of things with simple poetical ideas that resonates politically and philosophically. As a thirty-something, he witnessed, during the span of his lifetime, the unprecedented industrial and urbanism growth of China, and his practice naturally interacts with this ever-evolving and disconcerting environment.

In one performance made in Beijing in 2010, he altered the continual flows of cars with the help of a duo of them slowing down the traffic by entering in a slow synchronized dance, in a place where usually individuality and speed prevail and excel. By replacing one traffic barrier protection and modifying it, or by using everyday objects, as air conditioning apparel or second-hand books, he extracts their philosophical value and shows us what we could learn about our daily life through them.

In yet another time and public space, this time a workers market, he asked job seekers to hand him, in exchange of some money, everything they were wearing on them. Like a contemporary archaeologist trying to capture a specific moment of the live and identity of his generation, he then conveys a cold multi-faced portrait of his contemporaries through the layout of their belonging on low plinths, the piece resonating strangely from their bodily absence.

Liu Chuang currently lives and works in Beijing after developing his practice in the boomtown of Shenzhen. His critical artistic approach based on conceptual work takes as its starting point the rupture between individuals and its inner aesthetics, exploring art into new territories.

Through his installations and performances, he reveals the voices of the multitude of individual’s secret lives, dreams and daily routines, revealing in the meantime the infrastructures of the contemporary society status quo and its comfortable truce negotiated by global capitalism.