Arte: 'I am a canvas': how artists are reinventing body painting
The invisible man: detail from Magazine Rack by Liu Bolin, from the Hiding in New York series. Photograph: Liu Bolin/Eli Klein gallery
The ancient art is being revisited by contemporary artists. Here we showcase the very different work of Chinese artist Liu Bolin and Australian Emma Hack
Cheerily looking forward to a "golden age" during his 16th-century papacy, Pope Leo X ordered a Florentine youngster be daubed in gold paint from head to toe. The boy died, done for, historians suspect, by lead poisoning. It was not a happy episode in the practice of body-painting.
Such ill fortune has not yet befallen the Chinese artist Liu Bolin, who has spent years strategically painting himself into locations around the world to stunning effect as these images testify. There has been the odd hiccup, though: patches of the skin on his face still peel away after early experiments using highly toxic paint to camouflage himself for his art in his native Beijing; and a few years ago he stood too long in a downpour painting himself into a scene in Liverpool and ruined all his camera equipment.
Currently exhibiting photographs of his work in New York before a trip to Europe, the 39-year-old drew crowds in Wall Street and at Ground Zero this summer when he painted himself to blend into (respectively) the financial district's landmark bronze bull and the half-built Freedom Tower. "Painting my body isn't the most difficult part of the process," he tells theObserver via email. "It's the standing still for five hours at a time." The slightest shift in position, he says, can ruin a day's work.
Using the human body as a canvas, agrees 38-year-old Australian artistEmma Hack, "is not for the fainthearted". Though Bolin is not due to be exhibited in the UK in the immediate future, Hack makes gorgeous, camouflaging "skin illustrations". Whereas Bolin puts his own body up for painting, Hack employs models, tasking them to stand still for between eight and 15 hours while she covers them in intricate patterns. "I trained as a make-up artist," she explains, "so painting on skin is second nature to me. It's a difficult process, but rewarding."
Hack, a former children's face painter, and one-time winner of the Professional World Body Painting Championships, was inspired to produce her new collection by a longstanding love for the wallpaper patterns of the Australian interior designer Florence Broadhurst. Hack chooses a model she thinks will fit with one of Broadhurst's bright designs, strips them bare and gets painting. "There are 540 patterns in Broadhurst's archive, so I've only scratched the surface in my work so far."
Bolin's art had a more political, sinister genesis. In 2005, he was one of dozens of artists forced to move out of a commune to the north of Beijing when the government decided to dismantle the settlement to make way for redevelopment; Bolin painted himself into the scenery in protest. The idea had been seeded a few years earlier even – "after I graduated from school. For a long time, I had no family, no job, no love in my life… I had no position in society." So he decided to visualise his sense of invisibility.
Some of Bolin's work is so effective – the image of him in front of a yellow digger, for instance, with the outline of his body only just discernible – it's hard to believe there haven't been any digital tweaks made. None, promises the artist; the only computer manipulation takes place during the early planning stages, when he superimposes his image on to a potential background in order to "show my assistants the idea and tell them how to proceed". Unlike Hack, he does not do the painting himself, but directs painters who trained at the same realist school in Beijing as he did.
Bolin has bridled in the past at the suggestion that these helpers do the hard part for him. "How can it be [my] work? I was the one who chose which site we should use," he has said, "and which assistants would help me do the painting." Over email he adds: "I spend a lot of time considering how best to camouflage into a background. There's a great amount of preparation work done beforehand."
And, as well, there's the standing still. To complete a single project usually takes Bolin and his assistants about half a day. Wearing military khakis (for their starchy, paint-friendly fabric, and also their high collars that reduce the amount of skin he has to slather with paint) and "a lady's facial cleansing mask" (the best method he has discovered to ward off that skin-peeling problem) Bolin poses while his assistants paint him.
Along the way, they take digital camera snaps to show him, so that he can make suggestions for improvement. Other than that, he tries to ignore his increasingly aching feet.
"You need inner strength to be a model for this," as Hack puts it. Bolin is a touch more grandiose, recalling the little boy who died from being painted gold in medieval Italy. "That may be my fate. Like death in the snow for a mountain climber. Like seafarers who die at sea. I choose to work this way."
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