On the surface of the stainless steel light tower, a digital animation shows Wujia, a kung fu artist perpetually pulling himself up a rope which can never be fully climbed. It is in fact endless: no sooner does the master of the exercise reach the top of the frame than the goal slip from his reach, and he finds himself at the bottom of the panels again, at the beginning of his task, much like Sisyphus of “Le Mythe de Sisyphe”, an Albert Camus protagonist continually taking a boulder to the top of an incline, never able to reach the top. The worth is therefore in the work, the pursuit, the haul, rather than the finish, the prize, the returns.
"Climbing Gongga Shan" is a Liu Dao art piece characterizing the modern Chinese citizen through the eyes of Albert Camus to hold his daily existences–his life in labor and place among an ascending national structure–in relation to the absurd.
Absurdity is never far away from a Liu Dao artwork. Endlessness and meaninglessness are juxtaposed with a sense of infinite value as silent, candid action is isolated in footage and transposed into an LED display that shimmers at the viewer to interrogate an area in his psyche perhaps controlling a fantasy or harboring a secret hope or any of a myriad of other worlds of emotion. Silence and candidness are attributes deserving glamour and admiration, as they receive in this artwork which celebrates a common Chinese citizen’s steadfast loyalty to his place among a family, vocation and country.
"Climbing Gongga Shan" relates most of all to the appendix to “Le Mythe de Sisyphe”, in which Albert Camus writes that the absurdity of Kafka is undermined by that writer’s sense of hope: monotony is not brutal when the individual moments of a routine are filled with luminescence, as they are in Liu Dao animations. [Pete Bradt]