Swimming in the Ruins

I first came to know Liu Qingshan in 2019, perhaps even earlier. By then, his work had already revealed a rare sensitivity: an attention to the body, and to those lives left outside dominant narratives. In his early photographs, the body functioned both as a vessel of lived experience and as a surface marked by social reality. Faces, gestures, and silences of marginalized communities formed the ethical ground of his initial practice.

Over the years, Liu’s artistic trajectory has continued to expand. His lens moved gradually from the individual body and the urban periphery toward nature, philosophical meditations on life and death, the fractures of social transformation, and the charged textures of everyday life. His recent works may recall the intimate domestic observations of Kyoichi Tsuzuki, while also evoking the spirit of the 1990s Apartment Art movement in Beijing, where private interiors became sites of public expression after the retreat of grand narratives. In some works, his sensitivity to chance, traces of action, and raw material presence also faintly resonates with ideas associated with the Gutai Art Association: art not as representation, but as a real encounter between body, matter, and environment.

Yet Liu’s practice has never been confined to an interior space. In recent years, his path has always been one of movement: from the mountain city of Chongqing to the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, to the streets of Japan, and to the dispersed lives of migrants and drifting communities. His photography carries the sensibility of one who is always crossing borders—arriving, pausing, departing.

Swimming in the Ruins may be the key to understanding his work today. Ruins are not merely architectural remains; they are also the psychic landscape of our age: loosened orders, collapsed meanings, reconfigured relationships, and omnipresent uncertainty. Ruins are cold, edged with danger. Yet at the same time, under the tides of the internet and artificial intelligence, we are becoming increasingly exposed, increasingly naked.

We can no longer be the quiet flâneur imagined by Charles Baudelaire, strolling at a contemplative distance through the city. We have been thrown into the current itself. What remains is to learn how to swim among fragments, how to breathe amid the wreckage.

Liu is, of course, not the first artist to look at ruins. Within European photographic modernism, abandoned lots, peripheral zones, and leftover urban spaces have long been central subjects. The French-inflected notion of terrain vague—later theorized influentially by architect Ignasi de Solà-Morales as indeterminate, suspended urban land—shaped many photographic approaches to ruins and marginal landscapes across France and Europe. In this sense, ruins are not only evidence of decline, but also spaces of latent possibility.

What distinguishes Liu Qingshan is that he does not treat ruins as spectacle, nor as aestheticized decay. In his images, ruins remain tied to breathing lives—to migration, labor, loneliness, desire, and everyday survival. They still carry human warmth, as well as the aftershocks of history.

Swimming, then, becomes both a mode of survival and a method of seeing. It requires the body to enter reality directly, perception to pass through risk, and orientation to be found within instability. Liu Qingshan’s photography emerges precisely under such conditions. These images are not simple documents of the real; they are ripples on the water’s surface of history. A seemingly spontaneous gesture of pressing the shutter can carry its vibration all the way to another shore.

We all inhabit this sea of ruins. Yet some images still allow us to feel that warmth has not vanished, that a fragile but genuine resonance between human beings and the world continues. Liu Qingshan’s work reminds us: even in ruins, one can still swim; even in ruins, life can still emit light.

— Moham Zheng Wang
Artist and Art Critic Based in Singapore