The Meaning of Images in Qiming Liu’s Social Media Circle

History, politics, and public issues are threads running throughout Qiming Liu’s art. If his earlier works were more often projections of history and politics upon his individual psyche, then beginning with the Social Media Circle series, the emphasis shifts away from private feeling. Liu begins to explore the internet and public space from his position as an artist.

It is particularly interesting that, as a contemporary artist, Liu chooses the “images” in WeChat Moments as his subject. Traditional literati painting established an aesthetic and an ideal way of life for a cultural elite through making, appreciating, exchanging, and selling images—paintings—thereby distinguishing that elite from ordinary people. Today’s artists, however, constantly post or repost images in Moments. The current-affairs images they share no longer seek to establish the aesthetic of a small circle; instead, they seek the widest possible agreement.

The Social Media Circle series is not merely a collection of images. In fact, the works reflect the many characteristics of images in the internet age.

The dense, overlapping images in the video assemblage Social Media Circle · Group show the condition of being surrounded by images today. They suggest that, in the internet age, images replace writing as representations of the world and become a principal rhetorical means of constructing public discursive space.

The images of Social Media Circle · Group are fragmented, without explanations of context. This symbolizes a characteristic of image circulation: images exist independently, detached from their surroundings and context. They replace the complex, connected thought represented by writing; in the age of images, people’s thinking becomes fragmented, discontinuous, and flattened.

Liu selects images circulating in Moments rather than images from the news media. This conveys the role of images in forming agreement as they circulate. By sharing images within Moments, people form a community of values and feelings. Images create consensus and a sense of identity among those who share the same values. They also become the adhesive of a “circle of friends.”

When we see the immense quantity of images in Social Media Circle, we not only feel acutely that we ourselves are surrounded by images but are also alerted to another question. Images stimulate our senses more readily than writing and speech. Under their massive impact, looking becomes a direct visual stimulus and response. Faced repeatedly with the visual impact of disaster and violence, we gradually grow numb. The more we look at harrowing images, the more they resemble simulated, safe, exciting spectacles. They progressively lose their power to shock and move us, while dissolving the significance of the actual events. The sheer quantity of images presented by the artist reminds us that we may consume image narratives in the moment while overlooking the deeper nature of the events behind them.

Liu also attempts to paint “images from Moments,” but his paintings do not simply reproduce photographs. In his hands, news images become somewhat crude, distorted, indistinct paintings. This differs from the ambiguity of Gerhard Richter’s photo-paintings, in which the blurring of figures from news photographs reflects his indeterminate stance toward political ideology as an artist.

Liu’s “photographic painting,” however, suggests a sequence: an actual scene becomes a photograph; the photograph becomes a painting; the painting becomes the viewer’s understanding. Through repeated transformations, an image’s meaning may be distorted, misread, or displaced, growing increasingly indistinct. The artist thereby suggests the great distance between a painted image and an actual scene. By repeating images through painting, he reminds us that an image is more than a projection of reality: it can also produce illusion, distortion, and falsification.