A meteorite expanding to the edge of explosion, is passing through the atmosphere, spinning indefinitely as if it will never land. Jiahong Liu’s solo exhibition EXHAUST is set to open in Berlin on December 20, 2018. The artist focuses on the existence being lost or exhausted by the beings, the nature, individual and collective memories. The photograph “Until It Falls” is more like a dying but unwilling to be extinguished energy, proving the eternity.

In Chinese, “exhaust” is pronounced the same as “catastrophe”. The works follows the artist’s personal experiences, and unfolds the stories around Northeast China and Berlin, Germany, which both have a leaden filter of war wounds and industries, oscillating significantly between aesthetic emotion and political consciousness.

As the embodiment of public memory, the monument is also a vague magnet that cannot be blurted out. In the series of “Monuments”, the artist cleaned the monuments in Shenyang and Berlin. Berlin’s post-war gloom has kept the native language muttering in foreign lands. Besides the images, Liu avoided collecting information from archives and doing field investigations personally, let alone whitewashing and manipulating the urban landscapes of different historical periods. There was not any interferences except the eagerness, diligence and the photographic trials of cleaning the monuments constantly. Because the chaotic nature of history has been often relieved by the desire of later generations to create, it is not for nothing, but for building a deep spiritual world. The artist’s action of cleaning was kept in front of another camera, which turns the single but multi-meaning action language into a more inclusive etiquette. This is a meaningless textual research of history, and a futility of revealing historical narration, being skeptical of everything.

“Biodegradable” refers to the biochemical reaction of naturally decomposing organic objects by microorganisms, which leads to the formation of common morphological substances in nature. This is also the case with the degradation process of human beings into white bones and solid objects after death. The photograph “Biodegradable” is an agent of “entropy”, which not only produces decomposition, but also lacks order or predictable chewing.

The four photographs of the series of “Boundary”, show the unsolved maze of images, consisting of ropes, chains, ox bones, low pixel images, acrylic plates, Buddha that witness everything and so on. All the objects, born by individual memories, constitute the collective memory of this city. They were reassembled and constructed in the suspended, misplaced and inverted contexts. Based on this city’s memory, all of them directly went for the artist’s personal perception.

Perception is the starting point and methodology of Liu. On this basis, the grand narrative generated by the re-visit of historical texts and images is deconstructed and reconstructed, and the poetical and lyrical individual emotions find the outlet by searching for the old and the new in restraint. The transfer of media and carriers, the leap from 2-dimension to 3-dimension emerging in this exhibition can all be seen by the naked eyes as the internal background color of her works being sustaining and full of vitality.

Curated by Jingyue Li