Love Story is inspired by a collection of romance novels that the artist bought in bulk from a dilapidated book rental shop in the Chinese city of Dongguan. Penned mostly by authors in Taiwan and Hong Kong, the novels were popular in mainland China during the 1980s and ’90s. At the time, they were circulated through rental shops and widely read by younger people in their teens and early twenties. Dongguan, the place where Liu purchased the books, is an industrial city that neighbors Hong Kong. It is home to numerous factories, including those that assemble computers, and also to many young female workers who move to the city from other parts of China seeking work. Various scribblings can be found in the margins of the books’ pages: drafts of letters, diary entries, contact information for pen pals, and more. As the books were passed from hand to hand, other readers added their own scrawlings on top of the previous ones, turning the books into a special archive of the outer and inner lives of migrant workers.
