It’s time to call it quits
I’m hitting up the exhibition opening at Local Space in Xi’an on April 18th, then heading over to Chengdu on the 20th. I mentioned this to Cui Fuli, and he was like, “Since you’re coming anyway, let’s set something up.” So, that’s how this talk happened.
The organizers asked for a theme, and I honestly couldn’t think of a single thing. I just picked up a book of Abbas Kiarostami’s poems lying around—*A Wolf Lying in Wait*—and flipped it open to a random page:
*The man came*
*The man came with a sickle*
*You stalks of wheat huddled together*
*It is time to scatter*
So I figured, why not? Let’s call the talk “It’s time to scatter.” No deep reason behind it.
I remember four years ago when I was doing my “Unease” show in Chengdu, I asked Zhou Bin if my work even counted as performance art. He thought about it for a second and went, “Yeah, I guess so.” Honestly, whenever people ask me what kind of art I do, I’m stumped. Some call it “conceptual art,” but that doesn’t feel quite right either.
Since I didn’t go to art school, I’ve spent the last decade or so just stumbling through the art world without ever really finding my “lane.” Lol. But honestly? Who cares about labels. For me, making art is just… doing something. Before it’s done, it could be anything.
So let’s just keep it chill and have a chat. I’ll share some of the stuff I’ve done, what was going through my head at the time, and how I feel about it now. We can talk about what I’m sure of, what I’m still confused about, and whatever else comes up.
Art feels like a delay of life, while life itself is like a rushing river—full of questions, but not necessarily any answers.
“NIGHT SCHOOL NY INSIGHT” Vol. 68
It’s time to call it quits
Lecture: Liu Yaohua
Host：Jody Huang
Apri 21t, 2026 (Tue)
Sponsor: UP-ON Performance Art Archive
Sponsor: Nongyuan International Art Village
Liu Yaohua
Liu Yaohua (b. 1982, Shanxi) is a designer-turned-artist who graduated with an architecture degree from Chang’an University back in ’08. You might know him for pieces like “Safe Range” and “Three Safes” (2013/2025), “I Wish You Peace” (2022), or that “Billboard” project that spanned Qinghai and Gansu with the Dapu Museum of Contemporary Art (2023-2024). Beyond his own art, he’s a pretty active curator and stays busy launching various art projects.
He’s also got two books coming out with Shanghai Joint Publishing: *Water on Fire: An Artist’s Life Journal* in 2025, and a concept book for *Wishing You Safe and Sound* in 2026.
One Billboard｜Qin Hai & Gan su｜2023-2024
Invited by the TAFF Contemporary Art Museum, artist Liu Yaohua’s “One Billboard” project was launched in August 2023 in the uninhabited area of Qaidam, Qinghai. He erected a solar powered billboard in the basin and launched a one-year “investment promotion” experiment, jointly initiated by the HOK platform and others, to explore the interaction between art, business, and society.
At the beginning of the project, the billboard unexpectedly disappeared in Qinghai, so the artist moved it to the Luobu Nur area in Dunhuang, Gansu to reinstall and publish it. The project has been postponed until December 18, 2024. During this period, Liu Yaohua personally traveled back and forth to the uninhabited area 38 times and completed 29 content replacements.
On January 24, 2025, the final event of the project, “Tomorrow’s Great Cold, Today’s Meat Eating”, was held at the Danqiu Gallery in Beijing. The artist used some advertising expenses to exchange for lamb meat to entertain guests, as a way to conclude the project.
Three Safes｜ Performance Video，10′50″｜2025
Liu Yaohua once created the “Security Scope” in 2013, locking three secret works in a safe and permanently keeping the password confidential, in response to Duchamp’s view that “there is no art without an audience”. These works cannot be opened, viewed, or interpreted by anyone, only their existence is known. This is precisely because the artist deliberately isolates the works from the audience, making them exist cognitively but “non-existent” physically and visually.
On October 26, 2025, Liu Yaohua drove around the streets of Shanghai and discarded three safes that had been exhibited three times but had never been opened (one of which was a redeemed private collection) in urban public spaces. For twelve years, the contents of the safe remain a mystery, and the gap between the audience and the artwork has been completely solidified.
Seventy-five Apples｜20 x 30 cm x 75｜2022
In February 2022, Liu Yaohua contracted an apple tree in the suburbs of Beijing. Before bagging the fruits in May, he implanted a steel needle into each of the 175 young apples on the tree, and then regularly accompanied and observed them in the orchard. He found that the apples implanted with steel needles grew significantly slower, had distorted shapes, and some fell or rotted halfway. By the time of the October harvest, only 75 apples had survived.
The artist took group and individual portraits of these apples, randomly selected one for X-ray scanning, and also took a group photo of it with supermarket apples. The project is called “Wishing You Safe and Sound” and held a solo exhibition “Disturbed” on Christmas Eve in Chengdu on December 24th of the same year. The artist also sent the picked apples to volunteers recruited online for free tasting and recorded the process of eating the apples on their phones.
