Word: liu
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...News reports blamed the Camorra crime syndicate, government mismanagement, faraway profiteers and ingrained local apathy for the troubled coastal city's worst-ever waste-removal crisis. The broader implication was that the modern consumer lifestyle is a ticking environmental time bomb. Watching the drama unfold on TV in Beijing, Liu saw the makings of one of his blunt but beautiful site-specific works of social commentary...
...Liu has risen to the top of the contemporary art world - in April, he broke a record for a mainland Chinese painting when one of his works fetched $8.2 on auction. His subject matter deals invariably with the consequences of modernity, depicting the forgotten faces of peasants in the Tibetan desert, or families displaced by the rising waters of the massive Three Gorges damn project. He's also done portraits of prostitutes in Thailand, and high school students in Boston. Says Morgan Morris, the Rome-based curator of this latest project: "Every time there's something coming to a head...
...subtly exploring sensitive issues in a China still prone to squash dissent is one thing; painting on the streets of Naples requires a different kind of courage. "This is under control of the clan," says one local, nodding toward the mounds of illegally dumped trash being rendered iconic by Liu beneath the exit ramp of State Highway SS162. "It's the Sarno family: they say yes or no if this gets cleaned...
...might also have veto power over whether a foreign painter gets to set up his outdoor studio on its turf. They're unlikely to have known that Liu was a millon-dollar painter - his support team telling anyone who asked that the Naples work was a "university project." (Liu does teach at Universtiy of Beijing.) Still, one person had told the local driver of the artist and crew, "We know where they're staying." In the end, the project appeared to have garnered a tacit approval, because by the final day, it had become clear that...
...event, the greatest danger to Liu and his crew came not from local mafiosi, but from the canker sores, rashes, flu and other maladies resulting from spending six hours a day working amid rotting garbage. With the Mt. Vesuvius volcano looming in the background, Liu titled the work, Shang Huo (Festering Heat). And the vitality of the image, he says, derives from it being created amid the stench of its subject matter...