It’s not always easy to spot Liu Bolin. The Chinese artist prefers to hide in the background—literally.
On the internet, he’s been called the “invisible man” for his camouflage art.
Liu uses his body as a canvas to paint himself into backgrounds. He’s blended into the Colosseum in Rome, the Louvre in Paris, and the Great Wall in China.
“There are often examples like this in my work, where there’s a problem you might not have paid attention to, but when I express it through my work, suddenly the viewer will go, ‘Well, this is a problem.’”
The artist says his goal is to spark conversations about social issues around the world. In one 2011 piece, he disappeared into a supermarket display after a scandal involving plasticizers in Chinese food products.
“Some friends told me, ‘Liu Bolin, after seeing your work, it made me not want to drink packaged drinks anymore,’” Liu says.
“There are often examples like this in my work, where there’s a problem you might not have paid attention to, but when I express it through my work, suddenly the viewer will go, ‘Well, this is a problem.’”
Liu is less known at home than he is abroad. He’s worked on campaigns with brands such as Guerlain, Lanvin, and Valentino.
(Read more: Hong Kong artist Wong Ping captures hopelessness of city’s youth in ‘ugly’ animations)
He’s also collaborated with the French artist JR to make the Louvre, and themselves, disappear in an optical illusion.
How he got started
The first time Liu “disappeared” was in 2006.
At the time, he was working in an artists’ village in Beijing called Suojiacun. When the local government moved to demolish the studios—arguing that the settlement was illegally built—he painted himself into the background as a form of protest.
“I wanted to get more people to pay attention to Chinese artists and artistic freedom,” he says.
From then on, Liu has used camouflage as a form of artistic expression. “I choose to hide myself because it suits my temperament and character,” he says.
“I believe this is the basic requirement of an artist, to want to create your own language system to express yourself.”
His work has touched on social issues stemming from China’s fast-paced development, including air pollution, food safety, and gentrification.
In most of his pieces, Liu keeps his eyes closed to completely blend into the background. But in 2013, he began to do something radical: open his eyes.
“Because I think opening the eyes represents a mind-set,” he says. “Even though we might have problems, difficulties, even some of them unsolvable, closing our eyes means avoiding them. But opening them means tackling them head on.”
