Born in Taiwan and raised in the United States, Wayne Liu is a photographer who works at the intersection of place and memory, creating images with a haunted cinematic complexity. In China he finds dream-like cities, spun out of air and as if only half-seen, insubstantial as memory itself, where hoardings rise from endless walls and brutal swathes of concrete dwarf the landscape. What sets this work most obviously apart however is his own emotional involvement with a now lost reality, tracing back the dim thread of memory to some point of origin that may no longer even exist, but has none the less marked everything since. It’s especially impressive that he manages to integrate social commentary and personal narrative so completely. The nature of his work, its dark, turbulent uncertainty, which is expressed here almost as a physical state, something immanent in the pulse of present experience, re-enforces that continuing frailty of remembrance. The effect of this style is (in part) to legitimise subjective expression as a means of discourse – here is what I saw, and then. It’s a risky performance, there’s nothing to hide behind, just a singular photographic consciousness whose reality is not the aggregate of factual appearances, but something much more elusive. They seem remarkably tactile images, as though they can (or aspire to) offer the actual weight or solidity of what he photographs, while at the same time acknowledging the impossibility of that very desire. The force of this tactility hangs on the permanence of exile, whatever sense of bodily displacement that they tellingly evoke, of being subject to the unfamiliar logic of somewhere else, endlessly. Where are you going back to anyway?
His website is here, while an excellent slide show of his project OK China can be found here.
