Liquidity Inc.

占据中央的是艺术家2014年的最新作品 《Liquidity Inc》（2014）。在整个作品营造的庞杂的视觉语言结构里，诸多事物的联系和演进似乎都可以以流动性（liquidity）作为隐喻。流动性似乎更加常见于金融用语，强调贸易流通的效率，而借用社会学家齐格蒙•鲍曼（Zygmunt Bauman）所提出的“流动的现代性”（Liquid Modernity）这一观点, 其又可以指涉当今社会个体的不稳定性与身份的不断转变。

trans.Occupying the centre is the artist's most recent work, Liquidity Inc. (2014). Within the vast structure of visual language the work builds, the connections and unfoldings of many things seem all to be figurable through liquidity as a metaphor. Liquidity seems more commonly a financial term, stressing the efficiency of trade circulation; but borrowing the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman's notion of 'liquid modernity', it can also point to the instability of the individual in today's society and the constant shifting of identity.

彭祖强 (Peng Zuqiang), Artforum 中文网, 2014 · in zh · read the full text

Liquidity Inc. provides a good example of this. The video tells the story of Jacob Wood, a Vietnamese orphan rescued as an infant at the end of the Vietnam War as part of Gerald Ford’s Operation Babylift. Living in America, he became a financial adviser who eventually lost his job during the crash and took up boxing. “You have to be defensive” Wood explains, speaking both of his job managing stock portfolios and of his love for martial arts. “It’s fluid. It’s like fighting.” Shots of commercialized boxing matches, word clouds filled with stock market terms, and Wood’s name on a glass of water flicker across the screen. Here, the connections spark more marvel than they do confuse.

Paddy Johnson, Momus, 2015-04-12 · read the full text

In Liquidity Inc., a video narrative about Jacob Wood—an investment banker cum MMA fighter—the figure is juxtaposed against digital CGI renderings of water. A conversation between the artist and collaborator, and mock weather forecasts that revive Benjamin’s Angelus Novus are featured. The central binding factor of the film is the liquidity and necessary mobility in a liquid-modern world. An omniscient voice repeats this motto throughout the video in a new age pop tone. The voice that speaks in an accented English references the flow of bodies from zones of precarity and the simultaneous loss of identity through the evacuation of heritage. This definition of “liquidity” takes on ironic overtures; being liquid is akin to the loss of self, the loss of homeland, and the inevitable loss of land as a whole. “Becoming-liquid” is heralded by business models and global citizens, but translates in the video to a drowning in a virtual deluge.

Vanessa Gravenor, THE SEEN, 2015 · read the full text

I ”Liquidity Inc.” blandas olika nivåer av verklighet i ett montage av dokumentär, fiktion och online-aktiviteter. Vyer av oändliga hav får minuten efter en konstruerad kvalité genom en Photoshop onlinekurs i hur man skapar just oändliga havsvyer. Vi som betraktare luras in i konstruktionen för att sekunden senare stå utanför den genom kunskapen om hur den är skapad, en smygtitt bakom kulissen. Även dess status som konstverk ifrågasätts. Plötsligt dyker e-mail och chattmeddelanden mellan konstnären och medarbetare upp där vi förstår att budgeten är neddragen, en flotte kan inte längre byggas och nya finansiärer behöver lokaliseras.

trans.In “Liquidity Inc.” different levels of reality are mixed in a montage of documentary, fiction and online activity. Views of infinite seas acquire, a minute later, a constructed quality by way of an online Photoshop course in how to make precisely such infinite sea views. As viewers we are lured into the construction, only to stand outside it a second later through knowing how it was made — a peek behind the scenery. Its status as an artwork is questioned too. Suddenly emails and chat messages between the artist and her collaborators appear, from which we understand that the budget has been cut, that a raft can no longer be built and that new funders need to be found.

Johanna Theander, Konsten.net, 3 December 2015 · in sv · read the full text