The Paper's reporter Qian Xue'er
"Time is irreproducible and insurmountable in my life, and I present it to you for more than thirty years." Painter Liu Xiaodong said. His solo exhibition "Liu Xiaodong: Your Friend" will be held on August 8 at UCCA Edge, UCCA Ullens Center for Contemporary Art Shanghai, featuring more than 120 works from the latest series of "Your Friends," as well as manuscripts, diaries and recent documentaries.
WriterSa Cheng, Chinese "sixth generation" filmmakers Wang Xiaoshuai, Zhang Yuan, the painter's mother, brother, daughter, and his wife Yu Hong, who is also an artist, have all been painted, and he has also painted more ordinary people's joys and sorrows. The exhibition is a concentrated presentation and combing of Liu Xiaodong's artistic practice in the past 10 years since his solo exhibition "Jincheng Kid" in Beijing in 2010. Perhaps the most striking of the "Your Friends" series is a work called "Ning Dai's Classmate Laughs Personally," where he says he hopes to record years of friends still sitting together and talking.
Affected by the epidemic, Liu Xiaodong was unable to come to Shanghai from Beijing to attend the opening ceremony, and he shared the origin of the exhibition through remote video. "A year ago, when I was in New York, UCCA director Feiyu Tian called me, and after returning to China in September, on the first day of the end of quarantine, he invited me to hold this exhibition in Shanghai." Liu Xiaodong said. Ten years ago, his solo exhibition "Jincheng Kid" was held at UCCA in Beijing, and in that exhibition, he used the eyes of "Northeast Small Town Youth" to look at his family and friends in his hometown of Jincheng. In this exhibition "Your Friends", he named the mantra of his best friend and film director Zhang Yuan, starting from the recording of the lives of ordinary people in northeast towns, to the "action paintings" that have traveled to many cities at home and abroad, and then to returning to China after the epidemic to create the "Your Friends" series, looking back on his artistic career.
Liu Xiaodong "Yu Hong and Red Children in the West Village of New York" 2020
"Your Friends" is the artist's first solo exhibition since UCCA Edge opened last year; in the video, Liu Xiaodong likens his relationship with UCCA to a close relationship of "digging out the heart": "Ten years ago, I paid for it once, and this time, I pulled out not only my hometown, but also my closest friends. At the same time, he was a little hesitant about whether Shanghai audiences would accept his works, "There are differences between the urban cultures of Shanghai and Beijing, and I am also worried that I came out of the northeast countryside, went to school in Beijing, engaged in creation and teaching, and was full of physical and mental contamination with the habits of the north, sometimes not necessarily suitable for the soil of the south." "But I hope that the incitement of these emotions about friendship, family, and love is not affected by geography." We all run into our own emotions and troubles in life, dealing with our joys and sorrows. ”
Meet life around the world
Walking into the exhibition hall of UCCA Edge, the surging news reporter saw several paintings from the "Golden City" series. Two shirtless men standing in the field, one of whom was working on an unidentified X-ray of "crooked ribs"; a woman in high heels in a billiard hall, smoking a cigarette, leaned against the edge of the table. Liu Xiaodong was born in 1963 in Jincheng Town, Liaoning Province, and when he returned from studying and working, he found that his hometown had experienced a wave of urbanization, and his memory was demolished as buildings were demolished, and the brush in his hand was a way to keep them.
"Every living organism is precious and respectable," liu Xiaodong said, in the first chapter of the exhibition, "Anonymous Walkers," he set out from Jincheng, where he walked into the Chinese neighborhoods of Italy in the "Migration" series and continued along the route of refugees from various countries into Europe; in the "Chittagong" series, he went to The Port City of Jidagang in Bangladesh; and finally returned to Beijing where he worked and lived in the "Your City" series. He tried to record the "many sentient beings" in the face of cultural conflicts, regional estrangement, displacement, and hardships in the face of the changes of the times, and realistically presented the joys and sorrows of ordinary people and the subjectivity of people.
Liu Xiaodong, "Things Would Have Been Worse," 2017
At the exhibition site, the group portrait "Things Would Have Been Worse" occupied an exhibition wall on the second floor, which according to the introduction, was Liu Xiaodong's work when he participated in the Milan Triennial. He was inspired by a 1910 Italian painting of a united working people, while Liu Xiaodong painted a refugee camp in Milan: refugees from Syria, Africa, Afghanistan and other places lined up in a row, they may have common expectations, but they may not have the same position.
Exhibition site
Liu Xiaodong, Steel Plate 1, 2016
In the "Chittagong" series, Liu Xiaodong documents the living conditions of shipbreakers in the Bangladeshi port city. In one of the paintings, Plate 1, he rarely presents the shipbreakers and the mottled steel plates in their hands in a double-framed way. The fragile, abandoned mobile crowd is a major focus of Liu Xiaodong's paintings, in the work "Chinatown", he depicts the Life of Chinese Immigrants in the Italian town of Prato, a small town that relies on the textile and leather industry, in this corner of the factory in the painting, some people play mahjong, some people watch, and Liu Xiaodong chooses to keep a certain distance from them, allowing the audience's eyes and judgments to enter the blank space of the picture.
Liu Xiaodong, Chinatown 4, 2016
"Your Friend"
Compared with the attention of the crowd and social issues on the second floor, the works on the third and fourth floors are more intimate. As Liu Xiaodong said in the remote video, he sincerely "pulled out" his hometown and relatives and friends here to share his private story, so the intimate scenes and character relationships that occurred in his residence were placed in a spacious art museum space for everyone to see.
The second chapter, "Back home," depicts a series of "portraits" of family, friends, and even still life objects around you. At the beginning of the epidemic last year, Liu Xiaodong and his family stayed in New York, and this part of the exhibition selected the watercolor works he created at that time called the "New York 2020" series, sometimes he would go to the street to shoot, and then draw "watercolor photos" based on what he saw, "calm" buildings and hand-painted people to collage the city under the epidemic in his eyes. In fact, "Returning to his hometown" is a turning point in Liu Xiaodong's creative practice over the past decade or so, and "hometown" first refers to New York, USA: in 1993, Liu Xiaodong and his wife Yu Hong set foot in the city for the first time for art; the other is the small village of Heitu Village in Jinzhou City, Liaoning Province, China, which is the hometown of Liu Xiaodong's father. In the watercolor collection "Black Earth Pit Movement", Liu Xiaodong tells a small story in a manner similar to a comic strip.
After returning to his father's hometown, he began to think about the nature of the interconnectedness of life, turning his creative attention to the people who were most closely related to his life: relatives, and close friends who intersected with his artistic creation, and thus created the "Your Friends" series. "Your Friends" focuses on many of Liu Xiaodong's close friends who have known each other in Beijing for more than 30 years: including the well-known writer Ah Cheng and Zhang Yuan, representative figures of Chinese "sixth-generation" filmmakers, and the family members who have been concerned in their creations: mothers, brothers, daughters, and yu Hong, who is also an artist.
Liu Xiaodong, "Old Mother", 2020
Liu Xiaodong, "Ning Dai's Classmates Laughed Personally", 2021
In the "Your Friends" series, perhaps the most eye-catching is a group portrait called "Ning Dai Classmate Laughed Personally". His friends and their families are gathered, as well as him and his wife Yu Hong. They appeared in various postures in front of a wooden window on the terrace of Wang Xiaoshuai's studio, which was said to have been open and Liu Xiaodong deliberately closed it. However, he didn't explain much about this, just wanted to record the picture of years of friends still sitting together and talking.
Documenting the "acts" of art
In "Your Friends", Liu Xiaodong shares his life "naked", but in the exhibition hall located on the third floor, a small "screening room" is set aside in the corner of the exhibition to play the documentary of the same name "Your Friends" filmed by director Yang Bo, once again presenting the friends and family members in the current paintings with a flowing documentary.
Liu Xiaodong, Self-Portrait of a Black Earth Pit, 2020
Documentary "Your Friend", Yang Bo, 2021
In fact, the inclusion of documentaries, diaries and other forms in the presentation of his works has always been a major feature of Liu Xiaodong's creations, and in this way, he has added a layer of "scene" to painting, and even reminiscent of the video recording form usually accompanied by performance art works. In the exhibition, a row of display cases displayed his handwritten diary. He copied the lyrics of the song "Your Friend" in it, which also appeared at the end of the documentary: "Your city, your landscape, your friends; the sky has changed a little bluer, the walls have been changed a little darker, the pillars have been changed a little thicker, and things have been changed a little more correctly." ”
Liu Xiaodong, Yu Hong, 2021
A clip from the documentary "Your Friend", filmed by The Paper's reporter Qian Xue'er
In this more than 90-minute film, you can see the story behind "Ning Dai Classmate Laughed Personally" and other works created on the terrace of Wang Xiaoshuai's studio. It was also there that Liu Xiaodong painted a standing portrait of Yu Hong, next to a thin branch with northern characteristics, Yu Hong, dressed in black, holding a tool of unknown purpose in his hand; in the film, it alternates with another scene: the 1994 film "Winter and Spring Days" directed by Wang Xiaoshuai, in which Liu Xiaodong and Yu Hong play the painters Winter and Spring, "performing" the people who paint and are being painted. "Time is irreproducible and insurmountable in my life, and I present it to you for more than thirty years." Liu Xiaodong said in a remote video.
The exhibition "Liu Xiaodong: Your Friend" will run until October 10, 2021.
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