LIFE WASN’T MEANT TO BE EASY, THIS IS MAKING THINGS HARD (2017) is a four-channel GIF animation installation, and the image comes from the “Reading the Beach” chapter of Reading the Popular by American scholar John Fiske. This book describes and analyzes the key places and texts, such as beaches, Madonna, rock music, and TV news, that people confront when they produce their own culture. The four images cited here come from cards purchased at Australia’s Cottesloe Beach in the 1990s, depicting three behaviors that had been banned by the local government, including 1. Topless sunbathing and performance for the male gaze (Figure a. “produces a meaning of the beach as a site for male sexuality”); 2. Performances of promiscuity with “connotations of a Roman orgy and/or a sultan’s harem”  (Figure c. “Wonder what the poor people are doing” and Figure b. “Life wasn’t meant to be easy. This is making things hard”); 3. Beach bums (Figure d.) We cannot know for sure if the original cards were official announcements, or the result of a well-meaning satirist poking fun at these prohibitions. Interestingly, these images nominally represent prohibitions, but they actually show a seemingly unfettered state of leisure for the bored bourgeoisie.

The original images in Fiske’s book were poorly printed black-and-white pictures. Liu used the style of American Pop artist Roy Lichtenstein, translating it into a series of high-definition GIFs that look like advertisements for a beach holiday. She chose Lichtenstein’s style because Pop is a part of popular culture, and as Thomas Crow once said, its surfaces actually conceal a deep compassion for its times. She has chosen GIFs because they originated from Instagram, Facebook, and other modern social media, where they are often used to express emotion. These images stand as prohibitions, linked to now-ubiquitous internet censorship and information removal.

—Text from< The Allegory of the Beach> by LU Mingjun

《生活并不意味着安逸，这是在让事情更难办》是一部四频GIF动画装置，图像母题源自美国学者约翰·费斯克（John Fiske）著作《解读大众文化》中的一章“海滩解读”。援引至此的四幅原始图像源于上世纪90年代的澳⼤利亚考茨罗海滩，描绘的是当地政府所规定的三条海滩禁令，包括：1，禁⽌袒胸露乳的、针对男性观看的刻意表演（图a，海滩作为⼀种窥淫的性活动场所）；2，禁⽌古罗马、苏丹式的妻妾成群的淫乱⽣活⽅式的刻意表演（图c，“我想知道穷⼈们在干什么”；图b，“⽣活并不意味着安逸，这是在让事情更难办”）；3，禁⽌流浪汉（图d）。无法确知这些图像到底是官方发布的禁令通告，还是好事的漫画家对于禁令的嘲讽，有趣就在于，名义上是禁令，但图像所提供的信息却是百无聊赖的中产阶级貌似毫无禁忌的有闲状态。

原图是一组印质粗劣的黑白图片，艺术家用美国波普艺术家利希滕斯坦（Roy Lichtenstein）的风格将其转译为一组高清的像海滩度假广告一样的GIF彩色动图。选择利希滕斯坦的风格，自是因为波普本身就是大众文化的一部分，若按托马斯·克洛（Thomas Crow）的说法，其表征的背后事实上还掩藏着一重深刻的时代悲悯；而之所以选择GIF动图，则是因为这样的方式原本也是因应Instagram、Facebook等现代社交媒介的产物，比如我们常用的符号表情，便常常使用这样的动图。当然，作为禁令的这些图像，似乎也可引申为当下无处不在的网络审查和信息锁闭。

—鲁明军，节选自文章《海滩的寓言》