From Youth Photography to the Pictorial Practice of Self-Formation:
--Deciphering the Images and Themes in Liu Jin's Photography

By Zhu Qi

Liu Jin's photography primarily reflects the theme of cruel youth in Post-70s art. Post 70s art touches on the cruel youth theme in a multitude of different media, including painting, sculpture, photography, video, performance art, and more. Liu Jin's photography can also be classified as a kind of cruel youth photography concept, the main background for which is a combination of youth art and conceptual art.

As Liu Jin took for photographs of youth life during the mid-90s, this could be his first display of the visual experience of youth art. Towards the end of the 90s, after Liu Jin came to Beijing, he first participation in avant-garde art practice was through performance art, such as "The Same Me" (1999), "A Day"(1999), "The Me in the Mirror" (1998), etc. Because performance needs photography to serve as a documentary record, Liu Jin photographed some materials related to performance art. This may have stimulated his movement in the direction of photography.

This kind of transition from photographic performance documentation to role-playing, staged photography, as a matter of fact, was the basic model that led many artists in the mid-late-9os to turn towards avant-garde photography. Performance art and photography were both the basic artistic modes for Liu Jin thereafter. His photography primarily employed methods of role-playing, but the relationship between the role-playing and the photography transitioned from its original recorded subject and documentary media, to the performance itself, no longer performance for an audience, but rather role-playing for a camera. At the beginning of the rise of avant-garde photography in the mid-90s, a variety of conceptual photography still mainly dominated. Soon, however, conceptual photography no longer expressed itself in terms of the concepts themselves, but rather as a kind of form for manifesting realist themes, and so, by the end of the 90s conceptual photography became one of the ways that Post-70s art began to present youth art.

Youth art was an artistic beginning for Liu Jin at the end of the 90s. These early performances primarily tended towards two themes, narcissistic self-love and masochistic self-abuse. Both sides are completed through bodily performance or the experiential aspect of live performance. For example, "The Same Me" series involves the simultaneous role-playing of male and female roles, and uses photography to merge the two images into one wedding shot. "A Day," "The Me in the Mirror," and "The Me on the Bed," conversely, all employ the merger of sequenced shots to show all kinds of postures, attitudes and poses of the self. This group of narcissistic photography works bear the characteristics of youth art, in one respect, but the dressed up, adorned and performed postures, still carry traces of the influence of gaudy art. After this, Liu Jin also participated in a live performance of self-abuse with an animal. This batch of narcissistic photos were the beginning of the transition towards the making of independent photography works, but were not yet genuinely conceptual photography methods. The 2001 Cruel Youth photography series was Liu Jin's turning point. This series not only initiated rise of youth-themed photography in earnest, but also began to merge with the Post-70s art that used photography as the medium for presenting its subject, with works such as "Dredging," "The River Bank," "Wangfujing Incident," "A Girl Called Jiajia," and "On the Hillside." This series essentially stabilized Liu Jin's mode of presentation. This mode mainly manifests itself, with all the various photography methods revolving around the youth art theme, and the performance content of the photography shifted in the direction of allegorical role-playing methods. Youth allegories were pictorial methods commonly used in the painting, sculpture, video and all sorts of media in Post-70s art, and Liu Jin chose youth photography as his medium.

The themes expressed in his earliest youth photography series were youth "death" and "rescue." Afterwards, this also became the main subject matter of Liu Jin's photography. "Death" was divided into various concrete forms, such as "suicide," "death by gunshot," "drowning," etc. In his pictures, Liu Jin used methods of post-modern imitation. In fact, his photography often imitated classic news photos, like the "Dredging" imitated new photos of World War II rescue troops, "Wangfujing Incident" imitates a famous news photo from the Vietnam War era of a guerrilla solider being shot. Liu Jin retains the relations between figures in the original pictures, postures and movements, engaging a kind of symbolic relationship between the characters, such as violence and innocence, death and rescue. These symbolic relations have been extracted from the news reporting context and place into the allegorical environment of the youth theme.

This kind of post-modern method often elicits debate. Some people question the originality of the image. But what cannot be denied is that this batch of Liu Jin's work bears a kind of visual characteristic distinctive to contemporary China, with the personal experiences of the Post-70s that took place against background of social transformation in China. The symbolic value of the post-70s art of the late-90s lies in its genuine return to self-expression stemming from indigenous social reality, as well as simultaneously seeking a form of selfhood suitable to express the state of the self. Just like the basic pictorial experience of Post-70s art, Liu Jin's photography uses the linguistic strategy of the early Cruel Youth imagery of Post-70s art. In fact, the Post-70s generation's main experience of Cruel Youth was internal, but Post-70s art presented the body allegorically. This method resembles the acting in a film or theatrical performance.

Liu Jin's "Bondage" and "Mildew" series take this method a step further in pieces such as "Woman in Fetters" (2002), "Mannequins on the Ground" (2002), "Mildewed Mannequins" (2003), "Mildewed Toy Models" (2003), "Her Things" (2003), and so on. Although this series is still an extension of Cruel Youth photography, it is nevertheless somewhat deeper in terms of its thematic and visual experience. The "Wangfujing Incident," and others in that series, displays an attentiveness to the social life and human cruelty of young people's conditions. Although there is death in his pictures, there is also a poetic sentimentalism. In terms of pictorial experience, the "Bondage" and "Mildew" series come closer to a kind of existentialist expression of the nihilistic feeling of nothingness, and in terms of aesthetic tastes, they approach an imagery of "nausea" or "ugliness.

This kind of pictorial imagery is also included in the later "Story of Youth" series. This photographic series involves a pretty young woman holding all sorts of objects in her mouth, such as a water tube, a pink plastic flower, etc. This is the beginning of another turn in Liu Jin's photography. While this series still maintains features of youth art imagery, it is pictorially partial to a kind of mysterious and supra-experiential quality of expression. This represents a move away from social themes and a turn towards a display of pure aestheticism. Although the woman in the "Story of Youth" exudes an air of youthfulness, the marks of early youth photography, in terms of its direct expression of youth and society, can no longer be seen. In the "Wounded Angel" (2005) series, this shift is even more evident.

Although the "Wounded Angel" series uses all sorts of sites that bespeak the times, such as 798 Art Factory and ruins below new high-rises, they are no longer presented to express social themes. Liu Jin has attempted to make this series more of a pure pictorial experiment in role-playing photography. In the pictures, supra-experiential symbols are added to the original youth photography template, such as angel's wings. In doing so, this series has begun to genuinely separate itself from the internality and interiority of youth art, and attempts to engage an awareness of the human existence and the absurdity and universality of our predicament.

Liu Jin's photography has undergone three stages; from performance art and photography to youth photography, and now onward to his current aesthetic experimentation. Although youth photography employed allegorical methods, these methods were not used towards experimentation in conceptual photography, but rather towards the augmentation of allegorical role-playing in youth art. Even though "Wounded Angel" has not really returned to conceptual and pictorial practice itself, in the role-playing of pictorial narratives, this series has turned towards a universal narrative, rather than a youth narrative. This reflects a major change in the Post-70s art at the end of the 90s, namely the gradual shift away from youth and self-expression, towards the expression of the universality of the human situation, as well as the visual experience of the pictorial practices of self-formation in contemporary China.