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“Love is like this pretty crystal doll which I used to look at for hours at a time. One day, it fell, leaving some beautiful broken pieces all over the ground. I picked them up quietly, trying to forget what I once owned. But sometimes, when I hand someone a cup of water, the memory of the crystal doll suddenly appears and the memory swallows me like a flood.”
Peony Pavilion.Dream Seeking-01, ID #13250
Liu Ren was born in 1980 and raised in the coastal city of Qinhuangdao. Upon graduating with an MA in photography and digital media from Central Academy of Fine Arts in China, she immediately became one of China’s young art stars. Her work has been featured extensively in the media: from Vogue Magazine to a chapter in Christoph Noe’s Young Chinese Artists: The Next Generation. This appreciation shown in both the mainstream press and academic circles demonstrates the wide appeal of her dream-like environments, which blend symbols and subtle commentary about the contemporary Chinese experience as seen in dreams, and with a child-like wonder.
Sleepwalker – The Forbidden City, ID #13870
Although her work is included in the category of photography, she is a part of the current art movement that utilizes digital image creation and image manipulation. Using the modeling software originally designed for engineers, Ren’s work rarely requires a camera at all, and allows the creation of photo-realistic, yet impossible scenes, allowing the complete creativity previously afforded only to painters.
