Reporter/Li Jing
Published in China News Weekly, Issue 1031 on February 14, 2022
The painter Liu Xiaodong has calmly classified himself as "middle-aged and elderly". In the past many years, like his friends of the "sixth generation" directors, he has often focused on ordinary people: migrant workers, sex workers, Three Gorges demolition workers, small-town youth... In the midst of the drastic changes in society, gaze at their confused, bland, and even mediocre state of existence. Entering the "middle-aged and elderly", people naturally change, more tolerant of others who are "standing on the opposite side", more understanding of all social behaviors, from "attack" to "package".
Liu Xiaodong took his eyes back from the depths of society. "I want to draw a group of my friends, friends who have been dating for more than 30 years, friends who have become fat and have entered middle age." On October 3, 2020, he wrote this sentence in his diary. At that time, he and his wife and daughter were trapped in New York by the new crown epidemic, and most of the time they were confined to the apartment, and the separation from relatives and friends for months gave him the idea of portraying the people closest to him. The shadow of the virus made him think about what these most intimate relationships really meant to him, and he read a sentence in a book that said that Chinese intellectuals generally have a problem - loving the far away, compassion for the world, but very indifferent to the people around them. He didn't want that.
Returning to China in November 2020, Liu Xiaodong began to create the "Your Friends" series, which was completed in the early summer of 2021, and in August, his solo exhibition "Liu Xiaodong: Your Friend" premiered at UCCAEdge in Shanghai. After half a year, the works came to Beijing, and from January 15 to April 10, 2022, they met with the audience at the UCCA Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing.
"Your Friend"
Among the closest friends, Liu Xiaodong only selected a few people to be portrait models for this series of works, such as writer Ah Cheng, director Wang Xiaoshuai and other people, these friends met him in the young age when they could have fun in the pain and even help them live together, when they got together, drank a little wine to be happy for half a day, and walked together to the morning.
He and Wang Xiaoshuai met each other at the earliest, and the two were admitted to the Central Academy of Fine Arts High School in 1980 and 1981 respectively, and later Liu Xiaodong went to the Academy of Fine Arts, and Wang Xiaoshuai entered the Film Academy. During college, Liu Xiaodong often went to the film school to play with Wang Xiaoshuai, and he was with these film students, often feeling that his brain was not enough, and they "played" into the students' film and television homework. In those assignments, the young Liu Xiaodong either dressed up as a murderer or danced emptyly on the roof of the building, "staring at the big empty eyeballs", looking left and right, intending to be outside, circling around without knowing the end.
Some of the works on the "Liu Xiaodong: Your Friend" exhibition. This article is courtesy of the UCCA Ullens Center for Contemporary Art
In the 1980s, when they were confused and explored together, both the art world and the literary world were new and trendy. After the emergence of the "85 New Wave", modern Chinese artists have sprung up to make relentless criticism of academies and traditions. Performance art and conceptual art filled the main exhibition hall of the modern art exhibition held at the museum in 1989. In the mid-to-late 1980s, the literary world, represented by several writers such as Liu Zhenyun, appeared "neo-realism", focusing on real people in trivial lives. From this point of view, Liu Xiaodong's future creative direction is a bit like the new realism of the painting world.
At that time, Liu Xiaodong had not yet figured out what he wanted to paint, ethnicity, Dunhuang, classical, abstract... I was curious about everything, tried everything, and I once splashed ink on my body and rolled on the canvas, engaging in performance art. Looking back now, he feels that most of them are the hormones of young people, and they have to show off among their classmates, and they are not convinced of the entire art history. It wasn't until graduating from college in 1988 that the restlessness slowly faded and the whole person quieted down. Although he stayed in school to teach, after all, he entered the society, and there were no longer parents and teachers "covered", whether it was the social events at that time or the personnel changes and life changes he himself experienced, which touched him and made him have a desire to create the "things in front of him" that he observed. At that time, most of the academic oil paintings showed grand historical revolutionary themes or landscapes, and Liu Xiaodong chose to break the daily life, the railway station, the corridors of the summer university, the corridors, the distraught teenagers...
One day in the early 1990s, Jia Zhangke, a young man in the town, took the professional examination of the film school and wandered to the Academy of Fine Arts, and Liu Xiaodong's paintings suddenly attracted him, because he saw daily life for the first time in oil painting, which contained strange poetry. Years later, he mentioned one of his most memorable paintings, of a few young men from outside dressed in larger suits, standing by a charred, rambling rat, unable to tell whether they were laughing or confused. The irreplaceable sadness, melancholy and anxiety and confusion that pervade those paintings are all familiar to Jia Zhangke, "It was the early 90s of the last century, and I could fully understand what the melancholy that hung over the hearts of young people was, and why there was such melancholy." Fan Di'an, the critic who first discovered Liu Xiaodong, once commented on him: "Express a new kind of truth." ”
Later, Jia Zhangke also became close friends with Liu Xiaodong. These young people who came to the artistic stage together in the early 90s came together, and they did not like authority, did not like the doctrine of the Eight Classics, liked to be casual, liked to contact more people, liked to "go with him". "We have some commonalities, just like an era has an era of personality." Liu Xiaodong told China News Weekly.
Liu Xiaodong's oil painting on canvas "Little Shuai"
They explore together as they walk, supporting and influencing each other, hoping to get out of their own way. In 1993, Wang Xiaoshuai's independent film debut "Winter and Spring Days" brought Liu Xiaodong and his wife Yu Hong to star, telling the story of them. Liu Xiaodong's paintings "Son" and "From ancient heroes to teenagers" are based on the films of Wang Xiaoshuai and others, and he also went with Wang Xiaoshuai to Jia Zhangke's film "The World" as a cameo nouveau riche...
Jia Zhangke had long had the idea of making a documentary for Liu Xiaodong. In 2005, when Liu Xiaodong went to the Three Gorges to sketch and create "Hotbed", with the financial support of investors and art collectors, the documentary "East" began filming. In the process of filming the documentary, Jia Zhangke got the inspiration for the film, and when "East" was finished, "Three Gorges Good Man", which won the "Golden Lion Award" for Jia Zhangke a year later, also completed the shooting. When receiving the award, Liu Xiaodong went to Venice as the planner of "Three Gorges Good Man" and Jia Zhangke.
Xiao Wu, Wang Xiaoshan... In Jia Zhangke's films, many lost young people seem to have come down from Liu Xiaodong's paintings, and Liu Xiaodong's works, to some extent, are like such films, showing those who are forgotten when the world quietly changes its face. Jia Zhangke talked about the similarities between them several times: "All contemporary Chinese artists who have a sense of life and perception may be very similar, because we live in such a change, as long as you still have a perception of life, you can't not pay attention to this change, you can't feel it." ”
Go to the real scene
"Your Friends" was painted by only a few people, which was suggested by the writer Ah Cheng. Since meeting Ah Cheng in 1993, Liu Xiaodong has positioned him as a teacher, an older brother like a spiritual teacher. Before starting the pen, Ah Cheng told him that to paint more than ten is to express yourself, to paint less characters is to express others, Liu Xiaodong is very inspired, he feels that he is not young, don't always be himself, this age should express more others.
This is not the first time ah cheng has inspired him. In 2003, after Visiting the Three Gorges twice, Liu Xiaodong painted two huge oil paintings "The Great Migration of the Three Gorges" and "New Immigrants of the Three Gorges" in the studio according to the picture data. When doing an exhibition in Beijing, Ah Cheng was invited to write something. A few days later, Acheng gave Liu Xiaodong nearly 100,000 words of historical information, and after reading it in detail, Liu Xiaodong learned that the Three Gorges involved such a long history of China and complex issues. "Acheng has a real sense of style and responsibility for intellectuals." Liu Xiaodong said.
Liu Xiaodong
The 100,000-word history stimulated him, and he suddenly thought, "Can I draw another picture?" Worthy of this kind of intellectual labor. "He wanted to change the way he had been painting in the studio, like a laborer, going to the real scene, no matter what the outcome, being present and not being there was the same.
In 2005, in Fengjie, Liu Xiaodong selected 12 Three Gorges demolition workers as sketch models to create the oil painting "Hotbed". In the picture, eleven migrant workers playing cards are surrounded by foggy mountains, and the white buildings on the distant mountains behind them are being demolished.
Since then, Liu Xiaodong has spent nearly 20 years practicing this creative way: taking action and rushing to the scene. He chooses scenes that are full of narrative and complex social factors, in places full of contradictions and conflicts, but do not focus on the special, but record ordinary things in complex backgrounds. Hometown Jincheng, Indonesia, Cuba, Italy, the U.S.-Mexico border... He paints all sorts of nameless people, a huge and dull group precipitated at the grassroots level of society.
He despised the idea that he was simply classified as "realism", and he felt that art should no longer be cut by any "ism". Others say that he painted "small people", and when he heard these words, he was also anxious, he thought that these words were very subservient words, and who was qualified to look down on whom? "None of my paintings are small people." He said it many times, because "they are all people who stand on top of the sky and bear the bitterness that life gives them."
In 2009, Liu Xiaodong tried to contact Castro while sketching in Cuba. According to his understanding, if Castro could make an ordinary painter stand face to face to paint, then he realized what he meant by serving ordinary people and realizing the meaning of equality between people. Unfortunately, there was no response.
"You see, why do you ask me to paint only ordinary people?" Liu Xiaodong sighed, "I can only paint what I can see in my life, 'not ordinary' is separated by a lot of guards and bodyguards, I really can't see, I want to paint, people don't pay attention to me." In fact, I just bring real life to you. ”
Liu Xiaodong's oil on canvas painting "ACheng"
Therefore, people see themselves in Liu Xiaodong's paintings. The scholar Wang Min'an once commented in the article: The person in the painting has no noisy light or the shadow of sin, he is all of us mortals who are full of hardships and at the same time turn hardships into pleasure.
For all sentient beings in life, there seems to be only one criterion that can be valued by him, that is, "there is something wrong with this person's face", which is a feeling that can only be pointed out. As Ah Cheng once said: "That value is always unclear, when it comes to a point, it can't be said anymore, it's out of shape, but, painting, there." ”
In the eyes of UCCA curator Philip Tinari, Liu Xiaodong is like a "painting journalist." He did not show an obvious sense of politics and symbolism like many post-60s painters, he just put social reality on the table, and in the end, he had his own choices about which ones to record.
These paintings, which pay homage to reality, have been favored by the art market and collectors. In 2006, at the Beijing Poly Auction, "Three Gorges New Immigrants" auctioned the highest price of Chinese oil painting at that time - 22 million yuan. The painting is centered on a V-shaped river with a sense of oppression, and the surrounding characters are immigrants who have settled down and gradually started a new life, they have their own different perspectives, and they seem to carry a completely different life story.
Since then, Liu Xiaodong's auction record has been constantly refreshed. In 2014, the buyer of "Violation" was auctioned off for HK$58 million at Sotheby's Autumn Auction in Hong Kong, and this painting created in 1996 is also one of Liu Xiaodong's most representative works. "Battlefield Sketching: The New Eighteen Arhats" was sold for HK$61.9275 million at Sotheby's in 2008 and sold for 80.5 million yuan in Yongle, Beijing in December 2020.
Golden City Kid
Since he is the closest person to the painting, in addition to his best friend, wife and daughter in Beijing, Liu Xiaodong has also returned to the birthplace of life, his hometown of Jincheng, Liaoning, to paint his mother, brother and brother's best friend. He felt that painting was the best excuse to keep them together. If you don't paint, your life will pass, and when you pick up the paintbrush and look closely, he finds that many of these closest people have changed in many places. "Painting a portrait is really examining what you know about them." Liu Xiaodong told China News Weekly.
Eleven years ago, in Beijing UCCA he once held a solo exhibition "Golden City Boy", if that time reflected the old industrial zone in the northeast and his changing hometown memories, this time, he simply wanted to gaze at the infiltration of the years on the people closest to him. He slept on his mother's kang again, at night, his mother slept, he hid under the kang to write some feelings, 58-year-old Liu Xiaodong felt as if he had returned to more than 40 years ago, when he was a teenager hiding under the kang to paint.
In this small town, 25 kilometers from Jinzhou, the permanent population of Jincheng is less than 10,000 people. Unlike the decaying and barren aesthetics that many artists have built for the northeast in recent years, the hometown town has always maintained a warm background in Liu Xiaodong's heart. In his childhood memories, his hometown was inseparable from a paper mill founded in the 1930s, a place that was the envy of all the surrounding villages and towns, and entering the factory meant iron rice bowl and finding a good object. Jincheng's children play small children kindergarten, children primary school, middle school, and then assigned to the paper mill, they do not have to think about anything, they do not have to go anywhere, the factory is a self-sufficient small world, this small world of people are full of pride, never have to worry about the future. Until Liu Xiaodong went to Beijing to study in 1980, Jincheng was always a popular industrial town. He once thought that if he didn't come out to paint, his biggest appearance would probably be to be a propagandist in the factory, which seemed to be no bad.
Liu Xiaodong's oil painting on canvas "Yu Hong"
The preparation of the solo exhibition "Jincheng Boy" is since the age of 17 went out to study, Liu Xiaodong stayed at home for the first time for three months, he depicted those changes in the painting, many places were demolished, some childhood friends were laid off at home in their 40s, but they never left, which made Liu Xiaodong feel at ease, making him not a city person without a hometown. The optimistic humor of the hometown people also nourished him, his brother had not received a pension for two years after retirement, and the trouble was not over, but the brother always laughed and said "it's okay"; Liu Xiaodong was often depressed, but he was not afraid, he said that one day if he had depression, he would move back to live with his brother, and it would be fine.
His hometown is his rear, and it also profoundly affects his aesthetics, making him always have a vision of an agricultural society, "My personality is also difficult to change, so many years is still the same as the soil." He likes the old locust trees at the head of the village, the big stone millstones and the gray-headed villagers, even in New York, it is excited to see a tree, or it is also a little sad, seeing the skyscraper feels strange, feels empty, these things subtly affect the choice of his painting subjects.
UCCA curator Tian Feiyu told China News Weekly that in the past two years, due to the outbreak of various social contradictions in the United States, some artists have also begun to use realistic and narrative painting methods to depict the lives of people of color and marginalized communities in society.
At this time, Liu Xiaodong began to look back at his hometown, staring at relatives and friends, and his gaze seemed to become mild compared with those works that reflected social reality in his early years. Engaged in painting for more than 30 years, the change of age will inevitably lead to a change in the way of viewing the world, he does not want to say that this is a breakthrough of himself, because the word "breakthrough" is too greasy, "is not so willing to be framed", Liu Xiaodong pondered for half a day, looking for this word. He felt that since others had already praised him, he should not climb along the pole with all his might, and one could not be bored to that extent.
He does not like to express his works in words, once the words are spoken, they are too clear, and people have many complex and vague feelings, which are inexhaustible. That's why people like music, dance, painting, movies... Art is ultimately something that language can't translate.
In a documentary filmed by director Yang Bo to record the creative process of "Your Friend", Liu Xiaodong asked Ah Cheng: "Why are you always so calm and calm? Ah Cheng said, "You must first love the world, and if you don't love anything else, you don't have to say anything." The works created for relatives and friends for more than a year express Liu Xiaodong's love, and love will also give birth to "hate" and "fear", these three complex emotions constitute Liu Xiaodong's attitude to the world, but also make him happy to deal with the world, stimulate his desire to create. As for the content, he gave himself complete freedom and did not accept the definition of "ism". "Maybe I'll draw a few still lifes in the next paragraph, maybe, but I hope you don't call it symbolism again."