AN ARTFUL BLEND
Champagne house Ruinart aligns with prominent Chinese artist Liu Bolin
when ruinart approached Beijing-based contemporary artist Liu Bolin to be its sponsored creative talent in 2018, the champagne house founded in 1729 was continuing a tradition of working with the avant-garde that has spanned more than a century.
Although fans of both fine art and quality fizz may be aware of the marque’s more recent annual collaborations with two- and threedimensional artists, Ruinart’s hook-up with Czech decorative painter Alphonse Mucha way back in 1896, for a bold illustrative poster, resulted in one of the emblematic works of the art nouveau period.
Liu, who works in various media, is often dubbed the invisible man, the human chameleon or similar monikers for his signature style of carefully camouflaging himself and others with acrylic paint in order to blend into a background, all of which is then photographed. Works of this kind have been captured in front of famous paintings, such as Picasso’s Guernica and da Vinci’s Mona Lisa (both produced in 2016), or against global landmarks including the Great Wall (2010) and the Colosseum (2017) – and even supermarket shelving (2009) or hanging carcasses in a meat factory (2013).
Ruinart influenced neither Liu’s creative decisions nor even his choice of medium (he works in installation media, too) when he was invited to explore possibilities among the house’s vineyards, vats, bottling plant and ageing cellar in Rheims, and then create images. “I know artists might typically concentrate on the cork or bottle,” he said during two exhibitions of his collaboration with the champagne house during Art Basel in Hong Kong in March, “but I wanted to show the different stages of the process in the making of it.”
Liu saw all stages of how the champagne is produced and narrowed that down to seven images of his interpretation – placing himself and Ruinart workers, camouflaged in paint, in the frame. He also conceived an eighth more conceptual image, inspired by ancient chiselled inscriptions he saw in the deep chalk cellars. “I wanted to connect to the history of the place,” he explains. “It was amazing to be where some soldiers had left their mark on the wall in 1898, and I included my own fist, which is an image I have used a lot in my sculptures.”
So, after nearly two weeks at Ruinart making his collaborative images, does Liu have a favourite tipple from the champagne house? “I really like the rosé,” he confesses, “I don’t have a favourite vintage, but the rosés just appeal to me.”