Hiding in the City No. 88–Sawmill

Hiding in the City (Yǐnshēn zài chéngshìlǐ 隐身在城市里) was a series of photos based on earlier performance pieces that were made in response to the demolition of a Beijing artists’ colony, Suojiacun 索家村, where Liu and others lived and worked. Liu felt that the artists were invisible in the eyes of the state, and in later works he expanded this political vision of the disregarded individual to a more global focus, addressing other vanishing subjects from laid off workers to the giant panda to the city of Venice, Italy, slowly being engulfed by rising sea levels. To make the image, the artist stood absolutely still for hours as he was carefully painted to blend into the background.