Your Guide to Creative China
Profiled: Bai Yiluo
Published August 31, 2009
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Profiled is a weekly CreativeHunt column introducing the ouvres of artists living and working in Shanghai, or showing their work here in a forthcoming exhibition.
First up is Bai Yiluo, a Beijing-based multi-media artist whose work is being shown at OV Gallery next week. His work has been shown in local group shows, as well as at prestigious galleries all over the world (London’s V&A, the Pompidou Centre in Paris, etc.)
Bai Yiluo has been pigeonholed as a photographer for years, but his most stunning work is actually sculpture and installation pieces. In the 1990’s the Luoyang native (that’s up in Henan province) started teaching himself photography to alleviate the mind-numbing monotony of his work in a factory.
Today, he’s also creating large-scale installations, like this violent depiction of the relationship between imperious leadership and the labourers whose toil underlies all the privileges of civilized life.
Civilization; 2007
Simultaneously poetic and morbid, Bai Yiluo has become known for his motifs of death and loss. In the artists’ statement for “Recycling” (2008) he asks “What if there was a man or woman who decided to throw away his/her heart…to the first guy that came around collecting rubbish for recycling? Off goes the heart, as the garbage collector tosses it on to his three-wheeled bicycle. And takes the heart away….”
Recycling; 2008; “The absurdity of such a scenario is far less absurd than many of life’s realities.” – Bai Yiluo
Like a steamroller, Bai Yiluo levels the great and the small, and envisions global connections often overlooked. In his earlier works, usually collage-based, he linked the east and the west, the rich and the humbled, by pasting anonymous Chinese passport ID photos onto symbols of greatness: the American dollar, mummified emperors. While these monochromatic works required painstaking manual labour to produce, his later stuff has greater visual impact. He’s come a long way, baby.
Bai Yiluo will be exhibiting at the OV Gallery on Sept 9. Here is the weblink for the gallery.
Cover image is Untitled (Dollar); 2005.
First up is Bai Yiluo, a Beijing-based multi-media artist whose work is being shown at OV Gallery next week. His work has been shown in local group shows, as well as at prestigious galleries all over the world (London’s V&A, the Pompidou Centre in Paris, etc.)
Bai Yiluo has been pigeonholed as a photographer for years, but his most stunning work is actually sculpture and installation pieces. In the 1990’s the Luoyang native (that’s up in Henan province) started teaching himself photography to alleviate the mind-numbing monotony of his work in a factory.
Today, he’s also creating large-scale installations, like this violent depiction of the relationship between imperious leadership and the labourers whose toil underlies all the privileges of civilized life.
Civilization; 2007
Simultaneously poetic and morbid, Bai Yiluo has become known for his motifs of death and loss. In the artists’ statement for “Recycling” (2008) he asks “What if there was a man or woman who decided to throw away his/her heart…to the first guy that came around collecting rubbish for recycling? Off goes the heart, as the garbage collector tosses it on to his three-wheeled bicycle. And takes the heart away….”
Recycling; 2008; “The absurdity of such a scenario is far less absurd than many of life’s realities.” – Bai Yiluo
Like a steamroller, Bai Yiluo levels the great and the small, and envisions global connections often overlooked. In his earlier works, usually collage-based, he linked the east and the west, the rich and the humbled, by pasting anonymous Chinese passport ID photos onto symbols of greatness: the American dollar, mummified emperors. While these monochromatic works required painstaking manual labour to produce, his later stuff has greater visual impact. He’s come a long way, baby.
Bai Yiluo will be exhibiting at the OV Gallery on Sept 9. Here is the weblink for the gallery.
Cover image is Untitled (Dollar); 2005.
