LAUSANNE.- The first museum exhibition in Switzerland of Liu Bolin’s work, The Theater of Appearances brings together almost fifty monumental photographs and several sculptures illustrating the main themes addressed by the Chinese artist over his career: the political and economic strategies of the Chinese government, ancestral traditions and religious and cultural symbols, individual or collective acts of resistance, the transformation of the urban environment, ecological damages and a hyper-consumerist society.

In 2005, his series “Hiding in the City” opened with a self-portrait of Liu Bolin, immobile, covered in paint and melting into the rubble of his own studio located in the artists’ quarter razed by the Chinese government. Since then, any and all locations may be a potential source of creation, but in which he will only appear paradoxically: imperceptible and incredibly present at the same time.

In this retrospective exhibition, the sculptor, performer and photographer Liu Bolin, known as “the invisible man”, presents an extraordinary selection of photographs taken in China from 2005 to 2017. By challenging the viewer to find where the artist’s body is hidden in the image, Liu Bolin creates an unprecedented effect of a mirror turned towards the person who is looking at him. “Put yourself in my place”, he seems to be asking.

Posing sometimes for hours in front of a wall, a monument or a landscape, Liu Bolin thus totally fades into the background, with the invaluable help of his assistants and without any other form of manipulation. At the end of the process, the performance is immortalized in a photograph that creates an image which is playful on the surface but which actually conveys a deeper meaning: “Some would say that I disappeared into the landscape; personally, I would say that the environment swallowed me up.”

For Liu Bolin, it is not the artistic and human prowess of his performances in themselves that is of the essence but, instead, the backdrops into which he very specifically decides to disappear. Using his own personal history – his disappearance/appearance as an artist – he thus makes a revelation/denunciation of everything that is collectively at work around him in China.

Throughout his career, Liu Bolin has always been very sensitive to the social problems that have gone hand-in-hand with the political and economic upheavals of the People’s Republic of China since its foundation. Political watchwords used as teaching tools for working classes can be considered an underlying theme of the series “Hiding in the City”. Most Chinese citizens are so used to hearing them that they no longer pay any attention to these mandatory and explicit public messages that rapidly become meaningless. By painting some of them on his body, the artist is asking the viewer to discover their full meaning, a task that is sometimes more difficult than it appears to be.

Ecology has always been one of the key subjects of Liu Bolin’s artistic approach. His disappearance at the very heart of his images, only making this deterioration of life deep within the Chinese heartland more tangible, questions us both emotionally and morally: “I hope that my work will be a warning for my generation and for the generations to come”, he says.

For the past several years, Liu Bolin allowed himself to reveal the “trade secrets” of his performances, exhibiting the costume he wore or allowing a photographic or video recording of the entire artistic process. One of his costumes is on view in the exhibition.