Liu Chuang, Love Story

Some 3,000 copies of various Chinese romance novels make up this installation by Liu, a Beijing artist whose work focuses on the social, economic and political realities of contemporary China. Liu bought or rented the books from migrant workers in Dongguan, one of the industrial boomtowns along China's southern coast that have made the country the second-largest economy in the world. Assembled here, the books, heavily notated by their owners, offer a glimpse of the inner lives of anonymous—and mostly female—laborers.