The Artist Is Overshadowed By The Image

Posted: February 16th, 2012 | Author: artintolife | Filed under: art, fashion | Tags: art, artists, designers, fashion, haute couture, performance art, photography

When I first came across Chinese artist Liu Bolin’s work, it was extremely amusing. Enough so that I showed it to everyone in my family. It was clever. We laughed. We moved on. But the artist’s collaboration with Bazaar magazine for it’s March issue takes the artist’s clever trope and pushes it to the next level — moving it beyond the joke to something more profound (something that is perhaps there in all of the earlier work, but which gets overshadowed by the game). And I don’t think it’s just because we’re dealing with fashion here. Admittedly, art and fashion are a little like my own personal Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup (although the metaphor suffers a little bit from the fact that a deadly sweet tooth means that the Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup is really my ultimate Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup, still, you put art, fashion and a dash of cleverness together in one place and you’re bound to rock my world) — but I think it’s more than that.

Liu Bolin is known for hiding himself in his photographs.

Photograph by Liu Bolin via anonymonk's flickr stream

Hiding in the City: Great Wall by Liu Bolin via cheesebikini on flickr

Photograph by Liu Bolin from "Liu Bolin Invisible Artist" on amazing stuff.co.uk

Clever, brilliant, mesmerizing – definitely – but I’ve had trouble moving beyond the device. However masterfully done they may be, I find that how much I like each image correlates directly to how well the artist is hidden. Until the photographs for Bazaar. This time, rather than hiding himself in the image, Liu Bolin has hidden the designer within an editorial shoot of his own designs. It’s almost the same thing, but that little bit of difference turns out, if you ask me, to be everything. Perhaps it’s because the artist is finally able to stand behind the camera at the moment in which he shoots, but these photographs stand on their own as editorial fashion images first, and are so much more powerful as overall images than as games of I Spy, that you almost don’t care when you find the designer. Because of the premise of the photoshoot you have to do the looking, but I found that upon discovering the figure, instead of being completely entranced by that figure itself (as is the case when Liu Bolin himself is hidden), I simply thought something to the effect of “huh, okay then”, and then took a step back and returned to the photograph of the clothes. It is a reasonably profound statement, given what it says about the role of the designer in relation to his creation — in an industry in which the designer’s larger than life persona often flirts with the temptation to overshadow even his own work.