Liu Jin (Paperback)

This comprehensive new monograph on the emerging Chinese Conceptualist, Liu Jin, features work from 1995 to the present. Most of the work touches, in some way or another, on human cruelty, especially when interfacing with youth culture from the 1970s and onward. There are strangely touching naturalistic studies of young men and women in their own environments, doctored official documents, staged exercises in cross-dressing, graphic nude bondage photographs, and, most compelling of all, restaged photographs of our culture's most classic and brutal photojournalistic moments, particularly from the Vietnam "conflict." The book closes out with the Liu Jin's most recent work, haunting photographs of partially clothed, and sometimes bleeding, "angels" in degraded landscape settings, and performance pieces in which the artist challenges consumer culture in sometimes humiliating, sometimes hilarious settings.