Artist Liu Bolin’s “Hiding in the City” series was born in 2005 when Chinese police destroyed Suo Jia Cun, the Beijing artists’ village where he’d been working, because the government did not want artists working and living together. With the help of assistants, he painstakingly painted his clothes, face, and hair to blend into the background of a demolished studio.

Since then, the so-called Invisible Man has photographed himself fading into a variety of backgrounds all over Beijing, including a Cultural Revolution slogan painted on a wall and tiers of supermarket shelves stocked with soft drinks that were made with plasticizer. Like Bolin, the contradictions and fictions of China’s post-Cultural Revolution society are often hiding in plain sight.

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