Multimedia artist explores interplay between image and narrative

If everything can be edited, how can you perceive the world?

“CRISPR Whisper,” the latest exhibition by multimedia artist Liu Shiyuan at Fotografiska Shanghai, offers her insights to that question. Spanning photography, video, text, spatial installations and stage plays, Liu’s artistic practice reveals a profound exploration and interrogation of the intricate interplay between image and narrative.

The exhibition features photography series and video works, encapsulating the artist’s creative journey over the past decade. Liu’s works deconstruct and reassemble images down to pixels and video stills, the fundamental units of contemporary visual communication.

A meticulous approach parallels CRISPR gene-editing technology, which modifies the smallest units of life by trimming, cutting, replacing, or adding genes. Similar to CRISPR, Liu’s process of searching, cutting, and re-editing images generates new forms of visual expression and innovative ways of seeing.

Her method of inserting sequences and reorganizing them continually expands the possibilities of visual language while navigating ethical boundaries.

These works, challenging to define as either static or dynamic photography, are orchestrated and directed by Liu under the concept of “new photography.” In her early work, “A Conversation with Photography,” she critiqued classical photographic presentations by mocking stereotypical notions of beauty on the Internet through collected image materials.

In her latest series of photographs, “Cold-Blooded Animals,” Liu extends and deepens her recent creative use of online picture galleries and grids as foundational forms. By further reducing the scale of each frame, the works appear as an image malfunction that has gone out of control from a distance.

The latest creations \include the video “For the Photos I Didn’t Take, For the Stories I Didn’t Read.” Drawing from Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale “The Little Match Girl,” Liu reimagines each word of the story through contemporary image searches, weaving a new narrative that resonates with current realities, evoking the harsh conditions faced by children.

Within the multilayered chaotic arena Liu constructs, audiences are invited not only to re-examine how images shape perceptions and implicit biases but also to delve into the multifaceted meanings and latent attributes of these images in contemporary society.

If you go:

Venue: Fotografiska Shanghai

Address: 127 Guangfu Road, Jing’an District 静安区光复路127号

Opening hours: 10:30am-11pm (closed on Mondays)

Admission: 120 yuan