In 2006, after the Beijing artists’ village where he worked as a sculptor’s assistant was demolished, Liu Bolin painted himself to match its ruins and photographed the result. Conceived as a protest, that act initiated his Hiding in the City series and established the central device of his practice: the artist remains physically present while being made difficult to see. This 2014 monograph begins from that consequential fusion of camouflage, performance, and photography.
Bolin’s disappearances move across sharply different settings, from politically charged sites in China to grocery aisles, toy shops, and other spaces shaped by consumption. The images initially invite close looking—where is the figure, and how has the alignment been achieved?—but their visual puzzles carry a more pointed tension. The body can register as witness, obstruction, or erased individual, allowing Bolin to address particular actions of the Chinese government as well as the pressures and uniformities of consumer culture.
The book also widens the account beyond the best-known self-camouflage photographs. It presents sculpture alongside photography and examines the techniques used to construct Bolin’s carefully staged illusions. Images made with other participants—including members of Bon Jovi and fashion designers Jean Paul Gaultier, Missoni, and Valentino—show how the method changes when camouflage becomes collaboration, commission, or group portrait rather than a solitary act.
Published in English by Harry N. Abrams, the hardcover extends to 224 pages. Its importance for a serious photobook collection rests on the breadth with which it places a recognizable image-making strategy in context: an action born from demolition and protest develops into an international body of work spanning political commentary, popular culture, sculpture, and staged photography. Rather than reducing Bolin to the spectacle of an “invisible” figure, the volume makes it possible to study the sustained labor, conceptual flexibility, and changing social settings behind that effect.
