As a contemporary pioneer of China's neorealist painting tradition, artist Liu Xiaodong emerged in the 1990s and recorded the changes of the times with a paintbrush. On January 14, Liu Xiaodong's solo exhibition "Liu Xiaodong: Your Friend" opened at the UCCA Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing, focusing on the "Your Friends" series created by the artist who returned to China in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020.
In 2020, Liu Xiaodong was trapped in New York due to the outbreak of the epidemic, and he had the idea of depicting the people closest to him. After returning to China after months of separation from his friends' family, he immediately set out to create a new "Your Friends" series, which was completed in early summer 2021.
In the exhibition hall, the audience can see Liu Xiaodong's close friends who have known each other for more than 30 years, such as the well-known writer Ah Cheng, wang Xiaoshuai and Zhang Yuan, representative figures of the sixth generation of Chinese film directors. It can also be seen that Liu Xiaodong has been paying attention to the family in the creative process: mother, brother, daughter, and his wife Yu Hong, who is also an artist. The painting is infused with the love of mother and child, the love of brotherhood, as well as love and the love of the homeland.
"Insisting on creating portraits at the moment is a thing that is not optimistic, but I have always believed that portraits will always exist." Liu Xiaodong said that the process of painting portraits is the process of exploring the relationship between people, and it is also the process of examining himself and thinking about life. "The closer people are, the harder it is to paint, because I will be more strict with myself." Portraits not only embody a person's history, but also a social history. ”
The exhibition also features a series of liu Xiaodong's smaller works on paper, diary manuscripts, and a film of the same name, shot by director Yang Bo, documenting the creation process and background of the above works. The exhibition will run until April 10.