In mid-September 2019, I flew to Beijing to meet Liu Xiaodong and begin research for a monograph on his work. It was to be published by Lund Humphries for his now discontinued “Contemporary Painters” series, edited by Barry Schwabsky (Liu Xiaodong was released on October 1, 2021.) Over the next 10 days, Liu and I met daily, speaking for four or five hours at a time, with his longtime assistant Marco Betelli translating. Our very varied conversations covered many topics, beginning with his childhood in a Manchurian town with a paper mill built by the Japanese occupiers, and continuing with lengthy exchanges about the many places he had visited to paint. One of the underlying commonalities between the sites he chose was the deleterious consequences of modernization on a traditional society or group.
From previous research, I knew that Liu was an observational painter who worked on location, often on a very large scale. I learned that he had traveled to Uummannaq, Greenland, to paint the teenage residents of what he called, in an interview for the Louisiana Museum in Denmark, “an orphanage at the end of the world.” He had also lived and depicted men and women in the jade mining region of Xinjiang province, home to many ethnic minorities, including the now persecuted Turkish Uyghur people. I remembered our many conversations when I saw the exhibition Liu XiaodongShaanbei at the Lisson Gallery, which resulted from one of the projects we talked about in Beijing.
He was very open about his process. He showed me pages from his daily diary, as well as sketches, watercolors, photographs (including those he had painted on) and paintings he had begun on two trips to the Texas-Mexico border in 2019. Additionally, filmmaker Bo Yang has accompanied him for many recent projects, documenting Liu’s interactions with his subjects and the surrounding landscape. Back in New York, I watched Liu’s films in Mongolia and Cuba, as well as collaborations with well-known filmmakers Jia Zhangke and Hou Hsiao-Hsien.
Historically speaking, Shaanbei is considered the birthplace of the People’s Republic of China, as it was where Mao Zedong ended the Long March in October 1935. Like the Texas-Mexico border, Mongolia or Cuba – places where Liu traveled and painted – marching progress and the history of world conflicts have left their mark on its people.
The exhibition includes various examples of Liu’s immersion in Shaanbei life and culture. You have to see it in its entirety to feel all the facets of its deeply thoughtful practice. Bo Yang’s 40-minute biographical documentary Shaanbei explains that Liu first went to this area to paint in 1985. In the film, he shows a sketchbook drawing he made of an elderly man living in the village at that time and interviews people whom he meets in Shaanbei about him.
The entire notebook, which is on display, has been digitized so that viewers can scroll through the pages. When Liu visited Shaanbei in 1985, he was an undergraduate student at the Chinese Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA), where he now teaches painting. In 1981, he entered a CAFA-affiliated high school after passing a national exam. He was among the first wave of students to return to school after Mao’s death and the end of the Cultural Revolution in 1976. He was in his late teens and had not received a formal education since many years. In 1984, he was admitted to the CAFA oil painting department.
Traveling to a remote rural region of China and painting the people who live and work there is part of school politics, in keeping with the Chinese communist idealization of the peasant and worker. An observational painter who never became didactic, unlike his social realism training, Liu never says why he chose to return to Shaanbei after more than 30 years, leaving viewers to guess.
When Liu shows a drawing from his student notebook to the villagers, he also identifies the shift in thinking that began to occur while he was in art school – the shift from idealization to observation. directly from the subject. Shaped by changes and events in China in the years from Mao’s death in 1976 until the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989, his return to Shaanbei is charged. And yet, watching the film, I had the impression that he was trying to see what was before his eyes, and that his motivation was the same as when he was a student: empathy. It was in fact his empathetic desire to become “the other” that originally helped him break through the aesthetic agenda of socialist realism, with its emphasis on idealization and the heroic. Can he imagine what his subjects are thinking and feeling without passing judgment on them? As Charles Baudelaire describes the “painter of modern life”, can he become “independent, passionate and impartial”?
Liu marks his return to Shaanbei in the painting “Two Figures from the Back in the Mountain Rain” (2022). Compositionally, he was inspired by Caspar David Friedrich’s “Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog” (1818), in which a figure has its back to the viewer and faces the landscape. One of the figures in Liu’s work is the artist himself, walking up an incline towards the painting’s left edge, while gazing across the Yan River to the right at the city that s has developed there over the years since his last visit. A possible inspiration for this figure could be the “Place de la Concorde” by Edgar Degas (1875), an isolated example in the work of this artist. In addition to a parallel with Degas’ man walking towards the edge of the painting, holding a closed umbrella, both artists use the placement of shapes as an expression of politics.
What Liu brings together is stillness and movement, center and periphery. In Liu’s painting, his body tilts slightly diagonally, in counterpoint to the standing figure in the middle – the surrogate viewer. Can we become both and see with an open mind what lies ahead of us and, as the artist’s image suggests, behind us in our memories as we head into the future? The interaction of the figures with each other and the landscape invites new speculations about the relationship between past, present and future. Between the two figures, we can see a bridge crossing the Yan River. It suggests a link between the men without specifying what it might be. Directly above the central figure, in the distance, is a monument commemorating the Long March, which Mao proclaimed a victory (a dispute among historians).
What is striking and disturbing about the other eight paintings in the exhibition, all but one of which have between two and nine figures, is how many individuals occupy a lonely world, whether because they are staring at their cell phones , stand and smoke. near a door, or sing on a temporary stage in the middle of a nearly empty parking lot. In a painting of a single individual, “Wedding Dress and Vegetables” (2019), the young woman in a counterfeit Gucci tracksuit (as evidenced by her incorrect logo) sits alone on the edge of a coffee table, mobile phone hanging in a hand, presumably about to get married. A white wedding dress, along with pink and dark magenta flowers, are spread out on a couch. While pinks and salmon reds – an auspicious color in China and often the color of a wedding dress – are predominant, the scene hardly seems festive. Liu’s paintings are full of contradictions that viewers try to untangle.
Liu’s subjects range in age from young children to elderly men and women. “Irredeemable Loafers” (2023) features a group of teenagers while “The Roar” (2021) shows hardworking peasants gathered in front of a wall, listening to a man with his fist raised, singing what the film tells us is a patriotic song.
Working with a heavy brush and a sure touch, Liu does something unexpected: he paints empathetic portraits of people he barely knows, who are part of distinct social groups existing in a specific geographic and economic location in which he immersed himself. The film shows that Liu rented a typical apartment in Shaanbei for two years in order to undertake these paintings. When I was in Beijing, we talked about this project and the possibility that I could accompany him on one of his trips there; he made a point of telling me that we would not go to the hotel. Even when “played by” them, as he says of a group of teenagers who never show up to be painted, even after he buys them what they want (China-produced Gucci knockoffs) , he never loses his true affection. for them. The rapport he establishes with his subjects varies. Sometimes it is stretched but it is never broken.
Liu is one of the few working artists to have picked up where Édouard Manet left off in his synthesis of form and substance. He does this by directing a scene and costume the characters, which he learned by working closely with directors, while making it look natural. Liu’s combination of independence, direct observation, impartiality and passion, along with his use of a camera and collaboration with a self-directed filmmaker, allow him to see deeper into the hierarchically divided and warring world. in which we live. His main subjects are the people whom modernization comfortably pushes aside, often with the full approval of society – individuals and classes that few Western painters have attempted to embrace.
Liu XiaodongShaanbei continues at the Lisson Gallery (504 West 24th Street, Chelsea, Manhattan) through June 10. The exhibition was organized by the gallery.
