HOW Art Museum (Wenzhou) is pleased to announce that Celine Liu's solo exhibition "I'm Everywhere" will be on view from August 15, 2020 in the special project space.



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"In teaching us a new visual code, photographs alter and enlarge our notions of what is worth looking at".

—— S. Sontag



Photography is about the past, depicting moments of life frozen in time. It's an evidence of one's existence and a proof that certain events had taken place. Photography and notably documentary photography professes to depict reality. Yet ever since its invention, this thesis may be considered as rather an arguable one, and even false in our so-called "post-truth" age of media bias and fake news. With the rapid development of Web 2.0, information exchange and cultural globalization, the production and consumption of visual content has led to the composition of new rituals. The rituals of taking photos and altering them by using different apps, along with social media self-branding, have developed into an indispensable part of our daily life. According to S. Sontag, "images... have extraordinary powers to determine our demands upon reality."Now, as visual images altered, deconstructed, shared and rethought in different contexts, the distinction between reality and fiction, facts and imagery is blurring. We start to anticipate qualities of a virtual object from one existing in reality, thus simulacrum substitutes the original and reality becomes collateral of fiction.



Celine Liu explores the relation between imaginary and original by using language of photography and video art. She re-approaches historic narratives and cultural memory through her self-constructed images, and reflects on fascination over cultural icons in mass media environment and the values of commodity culture along with it. In her art practice, Celine Liu examines and re-contextualizes conventional social practices of the "worshiping of images", which are constructed and shaped by our digital existence and mass media environment.