CAMOUFLAGE ART: Can you find the Invisible Man?

Once again, Stephen Heller — who writes the Visuals column for the New York Times Book Review and The Daily Heller blog for Print Magazine, — gives us shock-and-awe images. This time, he acquaints us with Liu Bolin, a 36-year-old performance artist from Beijing, whose art form is what Heller calls “camo art.” Check this out:

Can you find Liu Bolin??

Liu, known as the “Invisible Man,” steps into his images… literally. He has been known to spend upwards of 10 hours painting his body to nearly perfectly blend into his surroundings, turning an eventual photograph of him into a living, breathing trompe l’oeil image.  In the photograph below, he is barely visible blending into an enormous American flag.

Performance artist Liu hiding in plain sight.

The YU Gallery in Paris has a month-long, one-man exhibition of Liu’s photographs which will close on October 31st.  Nine large images from the YU Gallery exhibition can be viewed here on the website of the Herald Sun, a Melbourne, Australia newspaper.

When asked why he does this, Liu explains that blending into his surroundings communicates social invisibility. “I experienced the dark side of society, without social relations, and had a feeling that no one cared about me, I felt myself unnecessary in this world, ” Liu told the London Telegraph. Liu considers his work a form of protest against the Chinese government, which he said, closed his art studio in 2005.   This photo, one of his most political, is amazing (see right):

Click here to view a YouTube video of Liu being painted.

Just Published: David Burnett’s 44 Days

Considered one of the world’s best working photojournalists, David Burnett published a new photography book this week, “44 Days: Iran and the Remaking of the World.” In words and images, Burnett gives us a behind-the-scenes, extraordinary eyewitness account of what he saw, photographed, and experienced during the chaos, brutality and political upheaval of the 1979 Iranian Revolution. Arrested at one point by the Shah’s police for taking photographs, Burnett’s images of street demonstrations, oppression and bloodshed in Iran culminating in the violent overthrow of the Shah — though taken 30 years ago — presage images broadcast worldwide last summer following Iran’s controversial election and its regime’s strong-armed suppression of dissenting protesters. In a telephone interview with New York Times senior photographer, James Estrin, himself a Pulitzer prize winner, who reviewed Burnett’s book in the NYT photography blog, Lens, Burnett observed, “When you look at my photographs, and some of the cellphone pictures this summer, it’s almost spooky because you see the same kinds of moments, except with different cars and different clothes. The irony is that the people in my pictures became the new regime that is now trying to quell the street demonstrations 30 years later.” Estrin reports in his blog that Burnett has tried for years to return to Iran, but Iran has repeatedly denied his requests for a visa. Nineteen stunning images from Burnett’s 233-page book can be viewed on the Lens blog here. CNN commentator and chief international correspondent, Christiane Amanpour, who was born in Iran, wrote the foreward.