In the trilogy’s first part, Into the Blue, the content is lighter, with more human subjects and buildings, and people presented with a formality that produces a sense of detachment. The photographs are prefaced by a quote, this time from American writer Rebecca Solnit: “Blue is the colour of longing for the distance you never arrive in, for the blue world.” This goes some way to explaining the difference in the two completed projects.
Liu’s pictures at first seem starkly at odds with each other, but are perhaps a consequence of his creative process. “Mostly I don’t research,” he says, adding about the quotes, “When I’m just living my life, reading, or finishing my series, I run into those sparkling sentences.”
Another project, Friendship and the Pink Triangle, is accompanied by a quotation from Michel Foucault. Childhood Revisited is prefaced with lines from Gaston Bachelard, a French philosopher, and Belgian novelist Franz Hellens. It was this latter project that caught the eye of Maria Teresa Salvati, editor-in-chief of Slideluck Editorial, at the Vintage Photo Festival in Bydgoszcz, Poland.
“He’s managed to develop a solid visual language that carries all his intimate thoughts, life experiences and intellectual references,” she says. “Looking at his photographs, it’s like a dive into his profound and sophisticated thinking, given back in the form of very poetic and powerful visual stories.”
Liu is an engineer by training, but was more interested in photographing people, hoping that their warmth could help him “escape from the coldness and strictness of machines”. Yet as he began working on his blue projects, he found himself reluctant to photograph human subjects for a few years. It was Visible Darkness, he says, “that repaired my relationship with the world”. Liu has since learned to embrace his engineering background, nding his skills useful in creating immersive light boxes, huge glass screens, and “alien-shaped installations”.