Changing Lights, 250×300cm Oil on canvas, 2021
Self-Portrait in the Kitchen (Black Ink) 31×31cm Ink on Paper 2021
Ning Dai Laughed Personally, 250×300cm Oil on canvas, 2021
"Old Mother", 150×140cm Oil on canvas, 2020
Acheng 270×230cm Oil on canvas 2020
Da Yuanzi, 150×140cm Oil on canvas, 2020
◎Houshang
Exhibition: Liu Xiaodong: Your friend
Duration: 2022.1.15-4.10
Venue: UCCA Ullens Center for Contemporary Art
In September 2020, Liu Xiaodong, who was stranded in New York, received a call from Feiyu Tian, director of the UCCA Ullens Center for Contemporary Art. Tian Feiyu invited Liu Xiaodong to do a solo exhibition at the upcoming UCCA Edge, and Liu Xiaodong then flew back to China. Liu Xiaodong received the same invitation ten years ago, when the director of UCCA was Jerome Sanss. Liu Xiaodong, who has entered the "middle-aged and elderly", seems to be the same Liu Xiaodong.
Black earth pit
Like ten years ago, Liu Xiaodong's exhibitions are inseparable from the same theme - the hometown of Jincheng. One is the "Golden City Kid" of the hard state, and the other is the warm "your friend". They are all about returning home, but they are not returning to the same township. Jincheng is not Kinmen, located in the northeast corner of China, 6 hours by car from Beijing. Historically, Jincheng is most famous for jincheng paper mill (Jincheng Paper Co., Ltd.), whose predecessor was Jinzhou Barbu Co., Ltd., which was built in 1939. In the 1980s and 1990s, thousands of residents of Jincheng worked as workers in paper mills, commuting to and from work, living around chimneys and trains, including Liu Xiaodong's relatives and friends.
In the past ten years, the population of Jincheng has only increased slightly, but the socio-economic outlook of Jincheng has changed a lot. After a long transformation, the paper mill that was once the symbol of Jincheng was suspended in 2015, and the foreign trade vegetable production base that succeeded the paper mill as the pillar of Jincheng's economy was the foreign trade vegetable production base. In 2010, the Internet hotspot was still "my dad is Li Gang" and "Foxconn employees jumped off the building"; by 2020, it will become "back wave" and "inner volume"; in 2010, the northeast has not yet got rid of its regional impression, but in 2020 there has been a "northeast renaissance"...
A few years ago, Liu Xiaodong's second brother retired, but he could not receive a pension, so he had to "nibble on the old" at home. The second brother is not at all like the "big brother of the black earth" mentioned by Tian Feiyu, but more like its deconstructor. Times have their own cruelties, but people just have to be as good as ever.
In his diary, Liu Xiaodong recorded that the second brother was cutting fruit trees at home. "When I woke up lazily at noon, all the trees in my eyes were only half of my body, and after a few years of nurturing, it was hard to cover the neighbor's window, which was good, the tree was shorter than the wall, and the rest was only the trunk, the side branches were gone, and the bare yard was full of cut branches. I collapsed, I screamed that I couldn't control myself, and half an hour later he wrote half a sentence in the crack of my scolding: Fruit trees don't prune and don't bear fruit. "What about the second brother?" He kept rubbing his hands, tears in his eyes, staring at the ground, not daring to look at me. Facing the camera, this old worker is somewhat shy, but this story tells us what the truth of shyness is. Is there shyness first, then sadness? Or is there sadness first, then shyness? Probably the latter.
During the Lunar New Year in 2020, Liu Xiaodong painted a large self-portrait. In the picture, Liu Xiaodong is lying naked in a field covered with thin snow in a black earth pit, turning his head to look at the audience. The land where my father was buried is now planted with sunflowers. Liu Xiaodong's self-portrait is a bit strange, it dodges, but it does not seem to be playfully provocative, but the core is clear at a glance. Liu Xiaodong mentioned in the documentary of the same name in the exhibition, "There is a kind of attachment to friends and family, there is a kind of love that is unwilling to express, a lot of love cannot be said, we will face love and friendship in a relaxed and humorous way, but we will use witty and humorous language to cover it." "It's not funny that this time the disclosure may be too blunt, so that the audience has not yet returned the taste."
Mom
In the movie "Winter and Spring Days", Dong played by Liu Xiaodong and Chun played by Yu Hong tear up by the railway tracks of Jincheng, wilderness, reeds, shotguns... Thirty years later, the father with the gun has long passed away, the second brother standing in the factory is now more accustomed to lying on the kang, and the mother, who rarely appeared in the camera before, has become the protagonist, no longer "picking up the rags", but often picking up discards after the autumn harvest in the crop field. Getting old is not really changing. The biggest change is that the action becomes static, and the complex creates cracks, and from the cracks, who secretly gazes at the audience from the picture.
Thirty years later, the "Golden City Concerto" became the "Black Earth Pit Movement", and the relationship between Liu Xiaodong's family also changed. The mother is no longer tough, the second brother and Xiaodong have exchanged positions, and some of the friends have left here. Liu Xiaodong claimed that he could not paint his mother well, so he simply stopped painting his mother. On the surface, Liu Xiaodong does not want to paint his mother as a bitter and vengeful look, just like the image of his mother in "Bitter Cauliflower" and "Gao Yubao". In fact, it should be said that the image of the mother is missing. Not only is my mother absent, but a Northeast China of heavy industry, even a small symbolic ancient town, is also absent.
From 1989's "Youth Story" to the present, Liu Xiaodong has rarely touched the "old era" and the backwardness that covers its surface. The people in the painting are always sad and active, fighting, but rarely show their pearly or oceanic sadness. Not everyone sucked out the sadness, but the positive Liu Xiaodong did it, when he was under wang Xiaoshuai's lens, wandering in the courtyard of the Central Academy of Fine Arts' faculty dormitory, he isolated the sadness, when he painted, he doubled the isolation of sadness, he isolated the sadness and effortlessly, he did not need to suppress it like Chen Danqing, while isolating it. But thirty years later, grief still comes as scheduled. Maybe it's the epidemic, maybe it's age, or the muscle changes in the hands? In short, Liu Xiaodong and the second brother, together, entered the middle-aged and elderly, that is, the age of sadness, and perhaps the second brother was sad thirty years earlier.
In an upwardly distorted space, mom still acts as a savior, a nurturer, and a real sad person. But the autumn villages give the picture enough light and color, and they are thick and layered. Mom sat on a stone bench, unreservedly surrounded by crops, fruits, and vegetables, her eyes missing the audience, as if she had found the real expectation. But as mentioned above, what could be more sad than the mighty light? This sadness is rooted in the depths of Liu Xiaodong's romantic and sad art across the century. Mom sat low, below the crops, the trees, below the light, but at the same time she was the highest person in the picture, and everything high melted in her hands. And only such a mother can take on the soldiers, the, the distress, the loss, and the passion that seems to have become powerless.
Friend
Since 2003 and 2004, Liu Xiaodong has practiced more than a dozen similar projects. Among them, the main projects are the "Three Gorges Project", "Golden Gate Project", "Bangkok Project", "Yokohama Project", "Yanguan Town Project", "Cuba Project", "Wuxi Project", "Jincheng Project", "Hotan Project", "Palestine-Israel Project", "New England Project", "US-Mexico Border Project" and "Friend Project". Often a project is a book, a movie, a walk, a report. Of course, each project does not necessarily involve other media and forms, but it inherently contains other media and forms.
In the 1990s, Liu Xiaodong began his global travels. In 1998 and 1999, while studying at the Academy of Fine Arts of the University of Compluse in Madrid, Spain, he traveled around Europe and visited various art galleries. At the beginning of this century, Liu Xiaodong found a space for free movement, when the Asian art market rose rapidly, Chinese contemporary art was extremely loud on the international stage, and curation, theory and system became the main axis of artistic creation. Liu Xiaodong, who has achieved fame and fame, can naturally control large or small projects, and naturally can calmly cope with the happy or sad consequences that projects can create. More subtlely, Liu Xiaodong's projects are mostly landscape-style. His strategy of appropriating the media, and the frequency, the noise is so high, the scale is often unmatched by the media, and as a result, his appeals are often unable to reach ordinary audiences, most of which are neutralized by the logic of the art circle.
Liu Xiaodong's painting while traveling is often referred to as process painting, or painting in action. This is the result of averaging. As mentioned above, action is only an outward expression, and what really happens is that the painter manipulates all modern media with the help of the project. Here, the modern medium is not a utopia, or an intelligent system, it is nothing more than a purely natural content. What is nature? Maybe it's the wilderness, or it's like Plato's cave. Above this wilderness, the painter had to face the fierce winds that could come at any time. Didn't that wind blow on the Qinghai-Tibet Railway?
Did the action change the logic of painting? Maybe not. Painting in action still has to be sketched, to paint against the real thing. However, unlike regular sketching, the sketching in action has an image base. For example, in the Three Gorges, or Jincheng, or the home of friends, Liu Xiaodong is painting, facing not only the model, he also has to face a project, a series of sketches, and so many images in front of him and in his mind. Pi Li once called Liu Xiaodong's way of painting a non-decisive moment. "Liu Xiaodong's oil paintings show a certain moment of ordinary daily life, which is the so-called non-decisive moment, which is very similar to the movie."
Perhaps the shaman mentioned by Acheng is more to the point: every time Liu Xiaodong goes to a place, he does not stay for ten days or a day, he can immediately catch things in that place, he has the DNA of a shaman...
Painting in action is an entry point for understanding the "Friend Project". Visiting Acheng in the autumn and Zhang Yuan and Wang Xiaoshuai in the spring constitute a complete narrative. From Ah Cheng to his mother, and then to Zhang Yuan, it is like watching time gradually approaching, and God gradually going farther away. Compared with other projects, the challenges of the Friend Project are very clear, how to better understand themselves, how to reconstruct their own reality by restoring the history of the object? Just like Ah Cheng was in the gap between being a model, moving his muscles and bones, suddenly looking up at the sky, and said: "Just for a while, the sky is completely open." And did the naked Liu Xiaodong who was lying in the Black Earth Village also have such feelings?
As we all know, Liu Xiaodong is also a "sixth-generation director" and a "sixth-generation director" who has never directed a movie. By chance, he met a group of sixth-generation directors, Zhang Yuan, Wang Xiaoshuai, Jia Zhangke and so on. Liu Xiaodong became their art director, actor, and producer. In 1992, Liu Xiaodong starred in "Winter and Spring Days" and served as the art director of "Beijing Bastards". These two films can be described as the sixth generation of the work. The grand history and national baggage pursued by the fifth generation are set aside, and the sixth generation explores the confusion of the lonely and real individual, and the loss of their face in the face of a rolling society, and they do not expect an intrinsically derived collective story. At first, it could be said to be an elite narrative, the product of academic transitions, but by the beginning of the 21st century, the sixth generation was the experience of almost everyone.
Whether it is the sixth generation or Liu Xiaodong, there is a different kind of moving truth. Ou Ning once concluded, "There is no shortage of portrayals of low-level figures in the history of modern Chinese art... Only in Liu Xiaodong's paintings do the low-level characters present their authenticity, and this reality can connect with our daily life experience and stimulate our heartfelt identification... "Is there an inevitable difference between Liu Xiaodong's authenticity and Luo Zhong's authenticity?" So what is Liu Xiaodong's true nature? Why do people think that Liu Xiaodong's authenticity is closer to what he means in his heart? Is it some kind of playful gesture, everyday language, life concern? Perhaps these are all appearances, the key is that Liu Xiaodong has let go of the high-pitched breath, loosened the existing restrictions, and opened up painting as a painting. In this "vulgarity", it becomes a "model" for undertaking change, progress, and rejuvenation, while at the same time, it leaves the strange land of one kind or another.
In 2003, under the influence of Acheng's "Yangtze River Chronicle", Liu Xiaodong came to the forefront of social change, China's Three Gorges, which was printed on 10 yuan. Hou Hanru once called Liu Xiaodong's art in dirty realism. filthy? It's about marginalized people, people who are "abandoned" by the times, and people who are seen through the mechanisms of social criticism. But this aside, all the participants emphasized was the original joy and passion. After seeing the Three Gorges, Liu Xiaodong said that the Three Gorges ignited his desire to create.
Years later, Jia Zhangke recalled: "It is more close to human beings. Why do you like people? In the face of these people, how to express their living conditions. The economic and living conditions of the people living in the Three Gorges are relatively poor. People live on that river, and after relocation, life may not be settled, but specific to each person, they find that happiness cannot be completely measured by money. We contact some people, they are still very active in life, they do not have too much melancholy, pain, wandering, people live well, earn a dollar happy, earn two dollars is also happy, really good. ”
Cenozoic
In 1990, the "Liu Xiaodong Oil Painting Exhibition" opened in Beijing. At that time, curation was not popular, fundraising, printing, publicity, and many of the work was handled by Liu Xiaodong himself. The exhibition presents 20 works created by Liu Xiaodong between 1988 and 1990, all of which were sold during the exhibition. The sensation caused by the exhibition is very large. Earlier, Fan Di'an discussed Liu Xiaodong's realism, that is, the creative purpose of the third studio of the Oil Painting Department of the Central Academy of Fine Arts. But soon after, Liu Xiaodong was incorporated into a more trendy and symbolic concept - the new generation. The term "New Generation" was coined in 1991 at the "New Generation Art Exhibition", sponsored by Beijing Youth Daily, and the executive curator was Wang Youshen. Since then, the new generation has become one of the keywords of contemporary art in the 1990s.
What is the New Generation? Rough answer: after 60. A relatively accurate way of saying this is that it was a generation that grew up in cities in the 1980s. That is to say, the new generation is the first generation to express and transmit the spirit of the city and urban culture, and they are the definers of urban culture. The early masterpiece "Youth Story" embodies this. Several young people stood on the roof of the building, their hearts filled with fresh longing, as if they were closely linked to the city in the depths. In the 1990s, Liu Xiaodong created and published a small article "The Spirit of Realism", which just confirmed each other. Liu Xiaodong believes that Chinese society is in the era of pioneering and pragmatic, while realism can truly reflect the times, and it must have its strong vitality in this specific historical period in China.
Thirty years later, Liu Xiaodong's Zhang Yuan snuggled on the sofa, his body shrinking inward, leaving only a pair of eyes, stubbornly looking at the audience. The red color in the picture reveals a thick texture. Compared with "Best Friend Zhang Yuan" and "Zhang Yuan Proposed marriage to Ning Dai"? The years added laziness, drunkenness, and ferocity to him, but he spared no effort to carry out the new generation to the end. On the surface, the new generation has returned to the family and self, but in fact, they have been left in place by the society they encountered and faced, but its tension and beauty lies in this. Once, reality was full of uncertainty, the new generation did not need to break through the restrictions, break the confinement, they only need to find the nearest roof to the scene, climb high and look far, you can open your arms to meet the new life. For example, Liu Xiaodong, full of art, creates a new trend with overflowing passion and happiness, while at the same time his wife and children are hot. At the same time, history passes by, globalization, consumerism, the atomized family, and entire generations consciously go to history and end the internal logic of history. The contrast between the new generation and the previous generation is more obvious: the previous generation goes to politics, emphasizes fun, focuses on dyeing, light implementation, and lightly gives shape; the new generation goes to history, heavy moments, heavy postures, light construction, and light subjects. If the previous generation was promised a new reality, the new generation was promised "reality instead of everything." And this process of change is the process of dividing from zero to one and one into two.
Or perhaps, what Liu Xiaodong is exploring in his actions is only the traces of the departure of history. At the beginning of 2021, Liu Xiaodong was still painting watercolors at his home in his West Village apartment in New York. Curfews, power outages, elections, BLM, marches, And Liu Xiaodong, who followed social issues, once again keenly grasped a "project". New York, which suddenly fell silent, became the object of Liu Xiaodong's pen. On April 17, Liu Xiaodong painted two watercolors, and he wrote in his diary: "The plane on May 17 was cancelled, and there was no ticket in June. How long will I have to wait to get back to Beijing? ”
Photo courtesy of UCCA Ullens Center for Contemporary Art