Ruowang Liu

Born in 1977 in Shaanxi Province in China, artist Liu Ruowang's artistic work deals with the fundamental questions of existence and the problems of the tension between the primal and human civilisation. His works are represented in numerous private and public collections worldwide. The Chinese artist will be at the 9th Swiss Triennial with his monumental, 36-part installation "Mr Pinocchio". The group of works has its origins in a real-life Pinocchio figure that Liu Ruowang once brought back from a trip to Europe for his child. It was not only the child however, but also the artist himself who subsequently became intensely preoccupied with the puppet. The motifs of the puppet and the lie became embedded in his world of ideas and became the creative basis for the installation "Mr Pinocchio". A steel puppet towers six metres high in the middle of the sky, surrounded by various stylised characters. Unsuspecting, the anonymous crowd seems to hang on the strings of Pinocchio, who has been chosen as the mastermind, blindly following his will. The alleged mastermind, however, symbolising the hypocrisy of global political and economic power mechanisms, remains merely a puppet himself and thus becomes a pawn of his own interests and the power structure outside his sphere of influence. In this way, Liu Ruowang achieves the wonderful artistic gambit of depicting the global power structures in their entirety in the simple motif of Pinocchio and exposing them at the same time.

 Quote

«As a child, I liked to ask for the truth. As I got older, I stopped asking.»