It was the summer of 1989 and Liu Xiaodong, a teacher at the middle school attached to the Central Academy of Fine Arts, was visiting his parents at their home in a village in Liaoning province, when he had a call summoning him to Beijing where demonstrations had been going on in Tiananmen Square since May. Liu felt charged by the calls coming from the demonstrators whose spirits had not even dampened by the downpours of rain on 20 May, although the situation was increasingly confused and events were spiraling out of control. Passions reached a climax when art students brought the white Statue of Freedom, a large work evoking New York’s Statue of Liberty, into Tiananmen Square. The chaos went on throughout the night of 4 June as the Square was ‘cleared’ and everything fell silent.
Persons familiar with events before and after 4 June 1989 all describe how the quiet was so unexpected and no-one foresaw how these surreal events would come to such a sudden end. ‘Yesterday you were in Tiananmen Square and today you are watching the Square being captured on TV, which was a terrifying spiritual experience. It had an enormous impact as a judgment on life and human nature imperceptible forces, determining what I would paint from that time on’. Liu Xiaodong has acknowledged that the events of that time would strongly impact on him for the next decade and more: ‘When I was a fiery youth, I wanted to express that movement, because in that vigorous political movement, people bled and others died, and you were inevitably influenced, because these events happened right here, not far away like the US invasion of Iraq’.[1] However, the works Liu completed in that year seem to have nothing to do with those events, which he had just experienced at first hand. Works of that time, such as The Cold Bath House (Bingliang de yushi), Herdsman Pastoral (Tianyuan muge), Fathers and Sons (Fu zi) and the many portraits of his friends going about their lives have one very direct and simple message: ‘Zhang Yuan is proposing to marry Ning Dai’. People found this perplexing.
Away in the USA, the prominent Chinese contemporary painter Chen Danqing, born in 1953, was far removed from the turmoil of the events in Tiananmen Square and he was able to directly depict these events in a series of dramatic paintings, demonstrating how historical events could be connected or at least discussed within the same context. In this way, the academic style and literary themes expressed the attitude and stance of Chen Danqing, as an overseas artist, towards the destiny of his motherland, and this mode of expression seemed to have nothing to do, however, with the current atmosphere in Beijing. Unlike Chen Danqing, the works Liu Xiaodong finished in 1989 had no connection with the reality of Tiananmen Square in either subject matter or content, and he was simply revealing his daily life and state of mind during the time after the events. Herdsman Pastoral is just a scene of the painter and his wife Yu Hong in the countryside; the space and the solidity are cut by the fierce sunlight, and the bland expression have nothing to do with real events. Although many critics later emphasized the atmosphere materialized and objectified in Liu Xiaodong’s works, Herdsman Pastoral does expose the melancholy of being at a loss and reveals the complex state of mind of the artist at the time the work was painted. But the graceful brush strokes and the firm resolve of the work differentiate this painting from his realist works, although he is beginning to express qualities that critics have used to describe the later fully-fledged works of the New Generation, such as ‘up-front existence’ (mianqian cunzai, Fan Di’an) and ‘the close-up sense’ (qiejingan, Yin Jinan), even though this work signals an achievement and records a particular time. In fact, Liu Xiaodong’s later work and influences are all related to that particular time in history, and it is in the context of his personal sensitivity, background knowledge and social environment that Liu Xiaodong, born in Jincheng town located approximately 25 kilometers from Jinzhou in Liaoning province, created Chinese art history.
Born in 1963, there was nothing unusual about Liu Xiaodong’s background. His birthplace is a small town with no historical associations. His parents were simple workers in a paper mill, although his father was a senior skilled worker. He played in the wilds between the farms and houses, collecting herbs, catching birds, stealing corn and train-spotting. Until 1972, his parents wanted him to later get a job in the paper mill. Liu Xiaodong has written that he liked to paint when he was a child, but it was his uncle who had graduated from the Jilin Art Institute who taught him to paint, so his knowledge of painting was first acquired from a member of the older generation. The picture-story book that his uncle wanted him to copy contained illustrators who were well known at that time such as the painters Chen Yanning and Wu Qizhong. Their works studied by many young people were small paintings that were affirmative in their modeling, clear in structure and rich in artistic interest. In fact, in the style popular during the Cultural Revolution period (1966-1976), we can clearly see the influence of these illustrators on the oil and watercolor works paintings of the army artist He Kongde. Chen Yanning and Wu Qizhong’s illustrations for the picture-story book series Song of the Proletariat (Wuchanjieji de ge) played a direct role in his education in sketching and understanding shapes. Liu Xiaoding, with his uncle, copied every page in this small volume, and then he began copying paintings by the Russian artists Ilya Repin (1844-1930) and Ivan Shishkin (1932-1898). Liu Xiaodong kept an extensive record of his early study of painting. Later he was engaged in painting advertisements and this also provided him with encouragement. His family members preferred that he go on painting rather than develop his martial arts talentsIn July 1980, Liu Xiaodong began studying art at the middle school attached to the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing. Now, he had the opportunity, the time and the environment, to look through foreign art books and folios he had previously never seen. From only knowing Xu Beihong, Qi Baishi and Ilya Repin, he now became acquainted with Western modernist artists, such as Van Gogh and Cézanne. Liu Xiaodong accepted the strict basic training at the institute, and his teachers, including Wang Chui and Sun Weimin helped and gave him confidence. In 1984, the 22-year old Liu Xiaodong and his future wife both successfully matriculated for entry into the Third Painting Studio in the Oil Painting Department at the Central Academy of Fine Arts. The teachers in the Third Painting Studio at that time were Zhan Jianjun, Zhu Naizheng, Luo Erchun and Wu Xiaochang, as well as the junior teachers Cao Liwei and Xie Dongming. According to Professor Yi Ying of the Central Academy of Fine Arts: ‘The Third Painting Studio aimed to explore new tactics and new concepts in realism on the basis of traditional realism, and, in fact, allowed students to develop a comparatively frank realist style’.[2] Despite what scholars might later claim, the art taught at the Third Painting Studio was realism, as Yi Ying has acknowledged: ‘On the whole, the style of the Third Painting Studio saw the addition of a little bit of subjectivity, a little bit of shape there and a little bit of color here to what were objective realist works’.[3] Although there were some differences among the teachers’ works, Zhan Jianjun for example stressing the importance of succinct summaries, possibly because he was one of the few post-1949 impressionist painters, according to Professor Shao Dazhen of the Central Academy of Fine Arts, but these instructors all focused on technique and they had few direct contacts with the modernist movement outside the school. Certainly, the lessons of history combined with the open social and academic atmosphere of that period created a basic attitude of tolerance among the teachers. For example, Cao Liwei employed open teaching methods having items of everyday life, such as ‘broken chairs, potatoes, firewood or things like that’, to use Cao Dazhen’s phrase, in his studio. Regardless of personality and history, what Liu Xiaodong essentially gained from his teachers was help and training in technique from different perspectives, and Liu Xiaodong’s years at the academy were mostly spent painting which provided him with a sturdy foundation for his abilities in modeling and observation. Liu Xiaodong’s later realist work certainly benefited from his training, which succeeded in fueling his future artistic passion. In this tolerant environment, Liu Xiaodong was not castigated for some of his work which satirized the conservatism of some of his teachers, such as Male Model Yawning (Da haqian de nan mote). On the contrary, this work won his teachers’ praise.
Male Model Yawning was completed in 1987, the year when the vigorous ’85 art movement was drawing to a close; at least the short-lived political campaign calling for ‘opposition to bourgeois liberalization’ had brought the widespread interest in Western thinking to a public end. However, teachers at the institute agreed that the mood of Male Model Yawning was obviously related to the earlier modernist movement. More importantly, Liu Xiaodong demonstrated that he was able to very naturally break away from the ‘negativity’ of the artistic mainstream mood that from 1976 onwards had established new relationships with the erupting skepticism and conceptualism. In fact, Scar Art from 1979 onwards had placed ‘socialist realism’ under suspicion, with paintings by Cheng Conglin, Wang Hai, Wang Chuan, Luo Zhongli, He Duoling and others being in aesthetic conflict and opposition to the Cultural Revolution aesthetic that stressed redness, light, brilliance, magnificence, immensity and totality. The official artistic criteria prior to 1976 were in total disagreement with the melancholy, skepticism and critique of Scar Art, with the gray depressed tones that matched Scar Art, and with the indeterminate and not easily pin-pointed political position that was expressed through Scar Art. However, for several years following the political changes of October 1976, society had a breathing space in which people could denounce the disasters of the past, because the ‘Gang of Four’ bore the historical responsibility for those disasters. The aesthetic style with which people had grown so familiar to the point of nausea could now be replaced by a different style, but a new aesthetic required new content and genres to get through the entrenched social and political system. For painters, the free use of color had greater appeal than the past use of color and modeling and brought work closer to the viewer. Moreover, people like Liu Xiaodong were able to use the new art forms to express their own personal ideas. At the same time as Scar Art made its appearance, there were activities organized by underground modernist groups, among which the members of the Stars group in Beijing vigorously expressed the possibility of freedom in artistic language. Although the exhibitions of this group were obstructed by the government, the political fight only succeeded in effectively lending support for the struggle for freedom of thought and the liberation of language. The Stars exhibition not only received support from the official publication Fine Arts (Meishu), especially through the acumen and courage of its editor Li Xianting, but also won encouragement from Jiang Feng, the leader of the Chinese Artists’ Association. In this way, slivers of information about modernism were relayed to a voracious public eager for knowledge. By the mid-1980s, Western thought, including philosophy, literature, history, economics, science, art and religion, were exerting a tremendous impact on China’s young artists. With the publication of large numbers of Western titles and general high praise for Western civilization in Chinese intellectual circles, experiments in modernist art had their tentative beginnings in most Chinese cities. By the mid-1980s, the artistic atmosphere created by what scholars call either the ’85 art movement or the ’85 New Wave art had formed a historic landscape providing the basic linguistic context for people studying art. This was why it was so natural and easy for Liu Xiaodong to express his own emotions and not feel that they were inappropriate.
For young people during that period, having gained freedom of thought and expression from the political and social background, the aesthetic response varied with each individual. Although it is very difficult to say that artistic talent is innate, Liu Xiaodong was certainly no ordinary student studying in the Third Painting Studio of the Oil Painting Department at the Central Academy of Fine Arts, but he too was necessarily influenced by his teachers and training. Another direct influence was the work of another student at the Central Academy of Fine Arts, Chen Danqing. His batch of oil paintings titled The Tibetan Series (Xizang zuhua) completed in 1980 was regarded as a major work in art history, and was highly praised for its ‘veracious’ depiction of the lives of Tibetan people, and like Scar Art works, these paintings provided a rare objective record. Even though they depicted life in a remote place, the realism had an impact on audiences comparable to the effect of the painting Haystack by Jules Bastien-Lepage (1848-1884) that exhilarated audiences in Beijing when exhibited as part of the first foreign art show in China in March 1987 as part of the Exhibition of French 19th Century Pastoral Paintings at the China Art Gallery, now known as the National Art Museum of China. The warmth and frankness of the paintings of Chen Danqing had a great influence on Liu Xiaodong, who has described how he was ‘shaken’ by them.[4] Although Liu Xiaodong and Chen Danqing had totally different experiences, knowledge and backgrounds, they were agreed on the question of ‘authenticity’ in painting and both were utterly unwilling to depict anything that was not there before their eyes. Liu Xiaodong and Chen Danqing were able to become friends and artists with a shared understanding because of the emphasis shared by their work, and we can also acknowledge that in this sense Liu Xiaodong’s persistence in maintaining a realist was innate.
In 1988, Liu Xiaodong graduated and was assigned to teach at the middle school attached to the Central Academy of Fine Arts. He finished The Smoker (Xiyanzhe) in that year, as well as Siesta (Xiuxi) and Drunk (Zuijiu), and these works expressively reveal psychological factors latent in Liu Xiaodong’s subconscious world, and his violently strong interest in what is close to him. The Smoker and Siesta were entered in the China Avant-Garde exhibition at the China Art Gallery in the following year, but as Liu Xiaodong’s graduate classmate from the Department of Art History Fan Di’an complained: ‘At that confused and noisy exhibition, people did not notice Liu Xiaodong’s paintings, and, in fact, almost all the paintings were neglected by the audience at the exhibition. Their attention was totally focused on the non-programmatic performance events and installations, such as Wu Shanzhuan’s Selling Prawns (Mai xia), Wang Deren’s Condom (Biyuntao), Zhang Nian Incubating Eggs (Fu dan), Li Shan’s Washing Feet (Xia jiao), Liu Anping’s Threatening Letter (Konghexin), and Xiao Lu and Tang Song’s ‘gunshot incident’. But Fan Di’an did notice the paintings of Liu Xiaodong and found new things in his works. In 1990, Fan Di’an noted that at China Avant-Garde in the previous year, no-one had paid attention to the two works of Liu Xiaodong:
[I] could never forget the strength with which Liu Xiaodong’s paintings seized me, and I even felt I might lose control of myself. His works push the scattered space in the consciousness towards us and we suddenly feel immersed in loneliness, like a person confronting time, suffering and an uncertain destiny. The figures in his paintings are full of emotion and will, and they are driven by their zest for life, but their interpersonal relevance is only because of their spatial coexistence. In fact, each individual is delivering his or her own monologue. I feel that many painters, treating the themes of human confusion and indifference, use arrangements of symbols and metaphors or a particular formal meaning to express their themes, but Liu Xiaodong’s oil paintings allow people to return to those states within themselves. Therefore, I feel convinced that his works are unique for their moral character and authentic expression.[5]
He further said that Liu Xiaodong did not set out to paint ‘fictitious scenes, but confronted those feelings that well up when sincerely confronting reality. When he paints, his consciousness does not contain floating images that slip towards the edges of the images he intends to depict. His concrete images are closely attached to ‘the existence before him’. Imaginative individuals are often unused to reacting to things they have not imagined, but Liu Xiaodong’s creative attitude seems to be somewhat distant from that realist style comfortable with structuring central motifs but totally conscious that a particular image has an allure that makes ‘this’ image irreplaceable, and his conscientious trust in reality unearths a new meaning for realist and figurative painting. By revealing, without a trace of dissembling, the true state of each of his characters or, more accurately, their psychological authenticity and reliability, his works acquire their realist intension’.[6]
Fan Di’an’s awkward phraseology should not prevent us from seeing that he has succinctly hit upon what makes Liu Xiaodong’s works unique: ‘[Liu Xiaodong] mostly paints interiors, and in them the characters and models with whom he is familiar are confined and enclosed. His indoor spaces convey a clear sense of ordinary life, expressing his desire to depict faithfully and not embellish with his imagination. The objects seem congested in the paintings, pushing them closer to us, and making us more attentive to his reality and existence of his characters. It seems that only these cramped compositions and his pure and unadorned characters can relieve the tension he feels. I can particularly note that several of his oil paintings have distinctively incomplete modeling, parts of the bodies of his characters are cut off by the edge of the work, and the everyday objects like cartons, extractor fans and desk lamps have been lowered within the space to enhance the visual relationship with reality’.[7] These observations are sharp, because we notice, in previous modernist works, that regardless of the techniques of expression the subject matter of the content seems remote and abstract. Now, Liu Xiaodong has instinctively abandoned images from history, philosophy or even metaphysics, and in the works of 1989 we sense the tedium and agitation induced by any objects apart from what is directly in his range of vision. But the object before his eyes that he is depicts runs the risk of being explained as an approximation of visual reality which, as Fan Di’an noted, could be seen as the expression of Liu Xiaodong’s inner depression and agony, and if this observation is true, then, the artist’s starting point and motivation do not correspond with his visual observation. For example, Meng Luding, another teacher, at the Central Academy of Fine Arts at that time and similarly suffering ‘inner depression and agony’ was painting abstract works. We can already see in his works from 1988-1989 that the painter is using everyday casual snapshots for his compositions. His works reveal his obvious understanding of and sympathy for his friends around him and he does not seem to have considered whether the states depicted in these paintings are different in any way from the modernist works that preceded them. Perhaps the painter was only painting what he wanted to paint. In fact, the works published in 1990 in the second issue of the magazine Fine Arts are obviously expressionistic. Although we can totally find the sturdy foundation of his realism in his brush work and modeling and works like Fathers and Sons (Fu yu zi) or Herdsman Pastoral make it clear that the painter is unusually practiced in his consummate modeling, people were, however, willing to regard these works as far removed from the system of the institute, the concepts behind the institute system of the Central Academy of Fine Arts being mostly Soviet. In 1990, Liu Xiaodong held his first solo exhibition in the Central Academy of Fine Arts gallery, and later he held a number of exhibitions with various of his classmates and colleagues, and sensitive critics began to talk of a ‘phenomenon’, something that linked directly to the modernist new art movement of the eighties. Liu Xiaodong’s solo performance was interpreted as the model exemplifying this phenomenon.
Whether people, including the artist, realized it or not, new linguistic contexts and inner feelings require alternate modes, and these must also be different from the modernist modes of the 1980s. As a teacher at the Central Academy of Fine Arts, Yi Ying had long been sensitive to the emergence of new artistic phenomena and, in the last issue of Art Research (Meishu yanjiu) of 1990, had predicted that the February 1989 China Avant-garde art exhibition would be a watershed in the development of contemporary Chinese art, meaning that the earlier modernism would be critiqued (overturned) and a rationality would characterize the new art:
The New Wave art has already lost its rationale as a term for artistic phenomena, and a new stage in modern fine arts will indicate that there has been reflection on historicity and commonality in traditional and modern cultures, that rational judgment and analysis have replaced emotional impulsiveness, and that technological training and cultural education are again permeating artistic work. This is what I describe as the rejuvenation of academism; in other words, a new academism will emerge as a cultural phenomenon. In fact, at the Modern Art Exhibition, at which the works of Xu Bing and Lü Shengzhong were representative, we can already see some of these phenomena unfolding, and in the first half of 1990 the new works of a group of young teachers at the Central Academy of Fine Arts formed the basis of a new academism that further offered a new theoretical probe.[8]
In this passage, Yi Ying brings in the most direct linguistic context for the new art: the art with modernism as its background that was displayed at the China Avant-Garde exhibition in February 1989 and the art of Xu Bing that contained earlier hints of post-modernism and whose Book of the Sky (Tian shu) which later would be regarded as exemplifying the new academism. However, by linking the new artistic phenomena and the academy, Yi Ying seemed to be concealing something: Was this because the great majority of the artists participating in the Modern Art Exhibition that he cited were teachers of the Central Academy of Fine Arts and examined technology in their works that their brush strokes and content showed ‘cultural training’? In fact, following Liu Xiaodong’s solo show at the gallery of the Academy, there had been a number of exhibitions: on 20 May, the gallery staged the World of Female Painters, showing work by eight women - Jiang Xueying, Li Liping, Li Chen, Chen Shuxia, Yu Hong, Wei Rong, Yu Chen and Ning Fangqian; and on 10 September Yu Hong had a solo show of her oil paintings. These painters’ works demonstrate different styles, but almost none of them reveal any of the clamorous spirit and mood of the ’85 art movement. In fact, many of the works show no particular trend in their expression, and some, like those of Yu Hong, contain giggling characters whose emotions seem to serve no particular purpose. Yi Ying’s concept of new academism was soon swept aside by the language generated by the New Generation Art Exhibition.
In July 1991, the New Generation Art Exhibition, jointly curated by the artist Wang Youshen and the critics Yin Jinan, Zhou Yan, Fan Di’an and Kong Chang’an, was held at the China History Museum. According to the statement of the artistic committee of the exhibition: ‘This exhibition brings together a important section of contemporary art history and is possibly the most important exhibition in recent years because it brings together the sensibilities of artists in this era. Participants in the exhibition included Wang Hao, Wang Huaxiang, Wang Yuping, Wang Youshen, Wang Hu, Liu Qinghe, Zhou Jirong, Wang Jinsong, Song Yonghong, Zhu Jia, Pang Lei, Yu Hong, Wei Rong, Shen Ling, Chen Shuxia and Zhan Wang.
The critic Zhou Yan described the works in the exhibition as displaying ‘a relaxed tone of mockery’, and at the same time the critic Yin Jinan made the following analysis of the trends in the show:
Right now, among the very rare experimental explanations offered by critics, we mostly find ambiguous or highly personal comments. Some describe the artistic significance of the New Generation artists or Close-Up Art (Jinjuli Yishu) in terms of ‘mockery and self-ridicule’, others simply call it ‘hooligan consciousness’ (popi yishi). Basically, these explanations only offer a broad brush conceptual notion of the spiritual position occupied by the New Generation or Close-Up Art…
The New Generation and Close-Up Art are only a beginning, just as we are now only at the beginning of the 1990s. The New Generation artists are experimentally attempting to use relative forms and a stylized artistic language in combination with a subconsciously proximate feeling for life to initiate their practice. Some works have cultural pertinence. The meaning of the New Generation and Close-Up Art and our theoretical concerns have all been mercilessly tested by history.[9]
Liu Xiaodong did not participate in this exhibition, but his art was rapidly brought into the fold of the analysis of New Generation Art. Now, all artists who demonstrate a similar psychology were being subsumed by critics within large general categories as I explain in my History of Contemporary Chinese Art: 1990- 1999 (Zhongguo dangdai yishu shi: 1990-1999):
Compared with the modern artists of the 1980s, they were all young. They had not experienced the Cultural Revolution, nor had they suffered the spiritual pressures ushered in by the successive political movements during the extremist political years, and so historical burdens and painful memories were not part of their background knowledge. Those painters born in the 1960s lack the spirit of what is called ‘collectivism’, which is something they have not had the opportunity to experience, nor a spirit of concern for the collective which is something that the available structure of education cannot inculcate. A spiritual atmosphere focused on chaos and the loss of meaning in real life can only arouse an instinctive disgust for the ‘collective’. In the past, artists cared about ‘mankind’ and ‘ultimate goals’, and the ‘grand soul’ and ‘salvation’ preoccupied the thinking of avant-garde artists in the 1980s. However, the New Generation painters did not have the slightest interest in this kind of thinking, and were largely indifferent to any relevant philosophy, thought or theory. They were different from the older artists, because of the many changes that had come about in their concepts and mental states in the face of reality. There had been a shift from human to individual concerns, from a belief in a metaphysical heaven to an acceptance of mundane physicality, from the abstract to the concrete, from enthusiasm to detachment, from adventurousness to placidity, from the poetic to the narrative, from collectivism to individualism, from the center to the periphery, from anxiety to ennui, from the serious to the frivolous, from responsibility to rejection, from remote to ‘close-up’. All these shifts and change ensured that the realist works of the New Generation artists were utterly different from the coexisting classical romantic paintings or the realist Scar Art from a decade earlier.
We must now consider just what the events of 1989 meant for artists, and ask ourselves whether the sense of suffering and oppression leads to a loss of direction. Idealism was proven by events to be a great mistake, but there was no reference point for how to go about adjusting one’s thinking and concepts. Were there new goals for artists who were once concerned with human destiny or with the salvation offered by the soul of the artist? At the same time as artists born in the 1950s continued to seek the specious ‘grand soul’, Liu Xiaodong and his friends, including Fang Lijun and Liu Wei who were classified as Cynical Realists, decided to share in the enjoyment of the helplessness and pain created by the lack of spiritual direction in his period. Like someone suffering from a mental illness, Liu Xiaodong felt that if only he refused to give thought to the reality he saw before him, and even to the delicate nuances that exist between two separate realities, he could then soothe his own heart. According to such an analysis, the artists of the New Generation rejected the quest for essentialism, which was also a renunciation of the rationale of modernism and this became the early spirit of the post-modernism of the early 1990s.
Society was oppressive but life went on; Liu Xiaodong kept on completing works adhering to an inner directive. He painted Cheers! (Ganbei), Young Love Runs Deep (Shaonian qingshen), which depicts mismatched love, Afternoon (Wuhou) with the bed scene, and Joke (Xiaohua) which shows friends gathered in a room. Showering on a hot day was also the subject of a work. The question is who was in the paintings and what was the purpose of the works? What we can see is that the artist’s use of his painting technique dissipates the meaning of the works, and possibly he does not want to or cannot talk about their meaning. Stepping back we discover that this is the spiritual climate of this period, underscored by the appearance of works with a similar psychological bent at the Guangzhou Biennale in 1992. We see images of blitheness, helplessness and mockery by Wang Jinsong, Zhang Yajie, Zeng Hao, Song Yonghong and even Mao Yan, and although these artists use different modes of expression, they are identical in their attempt to eliminate ‘meaning’ and be part of ordinary life.
Having his paintings praised by critics gave Liu Xiaodong great confidence. He began to seek out new possibilities spurred on by criticism and self-awareness. In 1990 he received a letter from Chen Danqing in the USA that included clippings about the painter Lucian Freud. It is unclear whether Chen was suggesting that Liu’s work was similar to that of Lucian Freud, although a critic in China had likened Liu to Freud, to which Liu retorted that he had never seen Freud’s work. When Liu Xiaodong finally did, however, see prints of Freud’s work, he felt that there might be a slight similarity. Regardless, if the elderly Freud had elicited a response from Liu it would have been his tense brush work and his solid color. Liu Xiaodong did like Freud’s explosive flesh and musculature, as well as his quotidian compositions. However, when Liu Xiaodong finally saw Freud’s work for himself in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 1993, he found that there was an immense distance between his own work and that of this Western painter. The most basic difference is that Freud’s temperament is thoroughly closed, and in making loneliness his motivation and starting point, the content he expresses is a gloomy dark inner world. His reclining males and females are adjectives for his inner loneliness and constraints. Liu Xiaodong painted the world around him: scenes of traipsing through the fields, his seaside honeymoon, his wedding banquet and languid amorous days. Thus, even if there was some conscious imitation of Freud’s work for a short time earlier, Liu Xiaodong’s attention was soon focused on his own modes of observation and expression.
In 1995, Liu Xiaodong began to teach in the Third Painting Studio, and his own painting was quite remote from the much discussed Freud. The truth of the matter is probably that Freud simply alerted Liu Xiaodong to the importance of the latter’s psychological elements. In fact, the importance of Liu Xiaodong’s paintings did not derive from his solid academic background or from the accommodation of his work at the Third Painting Studio, but from the sensitivity evident in his work from the beginning. His sensitivity was an innate, natural talent, aroused by his friends, teachers and classmates, as well as by his parents and his uncle. What is really interesting is his feel for the insignificant and subtle details of ordinary life. As he later told the critic Li Xianting, at a time when conceptual art was loudly propagating its beliefs, he thought the reason for the existence of painting was that it provided hints through ‘suggestion’. In the early days, Liu Xiaodong emphasized ‘documentary directness’. He said: ‘I draw my companions and friends, because these are emotions with which I am familiar. I want to paint ordinary people, but it is not my good fortune to know so many people. But through my paintings I want them to get to know me! They are out there in the sunshine, and I want my canvas, oils and brush to bask in the sunshine; they are sleeping, so I want to silently prop my easel up beside their beds’.[10] He does not clarify the perspective or mood he will adopt when he props up his easel. He later related the bewilderment he felt between the stage of observing reality and expressing it in paint, and discovered how difficult it was to condense the feeling, for example, when two people crawl free from a car wreck after driving into a telegraph pole at high speed. This is not a question of whether or not a camera can capture an instant of time, but whether the modes of painting can ‘condense’ its ‘suggestion’ about a psychological state seen in an instant. This ‘suggestion’ is of crucial importance because it draws the demarcation line between the photograph and the painting and between the painting of the academy and his personal painting style. So we see that respect for reality is respecting one’s own ability to have complete grasp of hints about reality, and we know that the ‘suggestion’ Liu Xiaodong refers to is the result of the artist’s own projection. After a number of years, Liu Xiaodong said that he wanted people to ‘open their eyes and see reality’, a remark he made at a photography collection news conference in 2007, and at that time, he was unusually clear about what he meant by everyone seeing reality; they do not see concealed reasons for things, yet are perceptive enough to see everything. Having fully appreciated art, pigments, life, society and many subjects, Liu Xiaodong now sees his own reality and this reality relates to everyone, but what he really sees in this reality that relates to everyone are spiritual questions - emptiness, depression, anxiety, sexual desire, confusion, sorrow, kindred spirit, comfort, love and sympathy. As soon as he has a grip on his confidence, he paints on the canvas relying on his natural abilities. The most important thing is that everything relates to one’s experience, feelings and knowledge that are a part of China’s experience after June 1989. Now, we can compare the reflections of Liu Xiaodong and Chen Danqing on 1989, and we see that the real difference between the two artists is that the former expresses his unique personal experience while having to respect the prerequisite that the individual has no options, and the latter has the prerequisite to harshly judge a reality he has not experienced and must rely on rationality to reach a sociological conclusion and make a sociological statement. They must use completely different languages, even though their methods can be crudely described using the concept of ‘realism’.
Until 2002, Liu Xiaodong looked at reality as he saw and experienced it; he painted Computer Boss (Diannao lingxiu) because he felt that his PC was beginning to run his life; he painted The Dying Rabbit and the Person with Nothing to Do (Yao si de tuzi he meishi gan de ren) because that was something he saw daily. The characters and plots in these works embody ‘suggestions’ regarding the reality that interested him, but the question is whether or not these hints really do serve to reveal moods and ideas. We also question whether there are no conflicts or issues in these works: The Blind Walking (Mangren xing, 1994), in which we see a simple scene of blind people strolling along a road with an army vehicle approaching from behind; in Traffic Infringement (Weizhang, 1996) we see a truck overloaded with bare-chested laborers and gas cylinders; in Burning the Rat (Shao haozi, 1998) we see sadistic youths who have set fire to a rat; and in Little Heroes (Zigu yingxiong chu shaonian, 2000) we see two gangs of students milling around at the corner of a wall. Many of the events from life that Liu Xiaodong depicts are far from ordinary, but are weird and alarming. The reason they are overlooked is not because they are excessively realistic; on the contrary their particularity is quite evident.
An artist’s life can tell us some of the secrets of his art. In 1993 he and Yu Hong played the lead roles in Wang Xiaoshuai’s film Days of Winter and Spring (Dong-chun de rizi).[11] Liu Xiaodong portrayed a dejected and unsuccessful artist who is plagued by spiritual gloom, suffers material want and feels spiritually adrift. Of course, by 1993 Liu Xiaodong had already enjoyed the first taste of success, and so he was able to empathize with the themes of winter and then spring in the film. The important thing was that Liu was enthusiastic about the film and he was mixing and working with friends, but was not involved in shooting the film. He was, however, the artistic director of Zhang Yuan’s film Beijing Bastards (Beijing zazhong) and in 2004 he had a cameo in Jia Zhangke’s World (Shijie). He used his experiences in movies to complete a number of paintings: his 1995 oil painting Son (Erzi) took its material from the Zhang Yuan film of the same name, and his 2000 painting titled Little Heroes took its subject from the film directed by Wang Xiaoshuai called Beijing Bicycle (Shiqisui de dance). But this involvement in and use of film was far from adequate for using pictorial devices to get out of the cramped artist’s studio. In fact, for Liu Xiaodong, film plots remained fascinating and worth realizing, but as an artist with a realistic vision of painting, there were not too many conflicts in methodology. At its source, from as far back as classical painting down to Soviet socialist realism and Chinese revolutionary realism and revolutionary romanticism, ‘plot’ occupied a special place. The generation of Liu Xiaodong’s teachers, such as Jin Shangyi and Zhan Jianjun, had been thoroughly familiar with and practiced in the paintings with plots that were advocated in the 1950s and the typical plotting of the Cultural Revolution period. Investigating history, it is very difficult to avoid drawing the conclusion that the tradition of the Central Academy of Fine Arts (including the atmosphere generated by Xu Beihong when he was director of its predecessor, the Beiping Special Art School) was one of realist plotted painting, except that in different historical periods the ‘plots’ of the paintings were somewhat different. Liu Xiaodong certainly did not intentionally take the question of plot in the academy’s tradition into account, but his knowledge and interest tended to make him extremely curious about ‘narrative’. From modernist concepts he knew that literary narration in painting was quite ridiculous, but he did not believe that particular plot elements garnered by reality were necessarily detrimental. However, for him the most difficult element to successfully grasp was ‘suggestion’. Reviewing his painting career, ‘plot’ elements from life are omnipresent, but in the eyes of the advocates of academic realism and the socialist realism of the past these ‘plots’ would not have warranted depiction. But then, basically what isn’t plot? Yet for Liu Xiaodong who had martial arts training in his blood, the enlightenment offered by visual reality is essential, and if some heart-wrenching element of ‘plot’ appears in reality, then he would have no hesitation, and would indeed even feel duty-bound like a knight-errant, to express it. In portraits like Eating Corn (Chi yumi, 2001) and Xiao Hong Smoking Late at Night (Houbanye chouyan de Xiao Hong, 2001), there are also suggestions of plot. Liu Xiaodong is aware of his use of plot and he uses it create tension and fear in two works of 2002, Human Disaster (Renhuo) and Dead Pig (Si zhu).
In 1997, Liu Xiaodong’s friend Jia Zhangke made a film called Little Wu (Xiao Wu), which was the story of a pickpocket who wanders the streets. The film revolves around a small town, small-time characters, crudeness, poverty, meanness and pathos. Liu was certainly familiar with his friend’s work, which they would have discussed at length and it is possible that the film also struck a personal chord in Liu’s own life. As a result in 2003 and 2004, respectively, Liu was inspired to create two large works titled Three Gorges Big Refugees (Sanxia da yimin) and Three Gorges New Refugees (Sanxia xin yimin).
Because of its massive investment and the enormous number of people it has displaced over many years, the Three Gorges Project’s function is to produce cleaner, more efficient electricity than coal-fired power stations, and when completed it will the world’s largest hydroelectric station, making it a source of national ‘pride’. However, a group of aware and sensitive people have pointed out that the important thing about the plant is not related to the massive costs and complex engineering problems but the potential ecological and humanitarian crisis it presents. Humanitarian experts warned at a very early date of the serious problems presented by this project, and, in fact, the persons displaced by the project have already faced a humanitarian crisis of sorts. Motivated by a sense of ethics and humanitarian instincts, Liu Xiaodong personally investigated the situation directly affecting these displaced persons, and depicted what he observed of the dam’s impact on their lives against what was for him an unfamiliar background. No longer did his work have an urban background but was set against the backdrop of the strange ghost towns and cities that will be engulfed by the rising floodwaters. There are no towering mountains or dramatic vistas of the Yangtze River. Everything has been reduced to powdery rubble brick with a few remaining dilapidated walls. The blue temporary shelters that house the builders symbolize the crude, temporary and penniless reality that remains. In Liu Xiaodong’s pictorial social report, we are moved by the details that the artist’s sharp and well-practiced eye uncovers, but if not for the reality content of the composition, we would have to concede that this work is disappointing in artistic terms in light of Liu’s talent. However, because Liu has included authentic historical scenes in his ‘investigative’ report, the report cannot avoid being harshly evaluated. In fact, from whatever perspective the work is viewed, the position of the report is suspect. The reportage provides no dramatic scenes of construction or the struggle with nature in full swing; there are no uplifting scenes and no heroic and moving deeds. What we can read in the work is an inspiring posture and a sense of numbness, and on the faces of the ‘new immigrants’ we can only see a sense of loss and the expressions of strangers. In the same vein as his friend Jia Zhangke’s film The Good Person of the Three Gorges (Sanxia haoren), Liu Xiaodong’s ‘immigrants’ are only a scene from a report, and the wild duck flying high in the sky is like the UFO in The Good Person of the Three Gorges, which is a portent of ill omen. Neither Liu’s paintings nor Jia’s film have any special complexity, and they simply present a report on the scene at the Three Gorges in the light of their own feelings and observations.
Like Jia Zhangke’s pity, sympathy and understanding of pickpockets and petty thieves, Liu Xiaodong wanted to express his empathy by depicting himself, urban itinerant workers and prostitutes together in the one bed, in the work titled Warm Bed (Wenchuang, 2002). Warm Bed reflects a change in Liu Xiaodong’s expression; casualness and unconcern, whereby Liu even recycles his earlier work as a ‘flowing river’, typify the artist’s observation on the loss and importance of time. Critics have made much of the concept of the ‘bed’. Pi Li, for example, wrote as follows: ‘In Warm Bed the action of painting and the existence of the bed construct a real space temporarily divorced from reality. They let those who rush about stay over and indoors and outdoors, in the sunshine and in the lamplight, men and women, playing and resting, scenery and fruit’.[12] But, as has perhaps been established, Liu Xiaodong was provoked to give serious thought to what he saw in the Three Gorges area; prior to that much of his experience was gained indirectly from books and in other ways. He would never again be confined by the reality he saw before him. Age and experience, as well as calm conditions, enabled him to interrogate the relationship between people and society and the significance of a person’s behavior from a more macroscopic perspective. This kind of thinking may have been one of the reasons why Liu had his friend Yin Jinan curate his Domino exhibition in 2006. Liu Xiaodong’s working routine for the show involved painting the content on the walls, washing it off overnight after the exhibition concluded for the day, so that on the following day, people could see that all those fabulously valuable works had already disappeared. Audiences could later go back and read the very long pieces that Yin Jinan wrote on the walls of the exhibition space that roughly boiled down to the following statement: Art should become fables of the contemporary. Empty sorrow comes after clearly knowing the splendid attire, and after the show there is also empty sorrow, but in this instant it is so brilliant! After Chinese contemporary art became the mainstream, it attained its greatest magnificence – an age of glory and pride, no longer subject to the rise and fall of melancholy. All along the watchtower, you see the beacons burn. After achieving the ultimate magnificence, there is the beauty of empty sorrow, and the domino effect is the epitome of those who observe it. Things are always destroyed, but the meaning of destruction is never the same. One can imagine that Liu Xiaodong would have certainly agreed with Yin.
One suspects that this event of Liu Xiaodong might have all been for show. Would a crowded exhibition really have to make a Zen Buddhist point? This conjecture would seem to have been confirmed when the artist took two days in January of the following year to paint a portrait for the actor Lin Zhiling. Whether or not Liu Xiaodong regarded this move as a meditation and kick-start for the entirety of the mechanism of the fine arts, we do know that a French collector after buying the work immediately donated it to the Art Museum of Guangdong, and people were willing to interpret this fashionable activity as a surefire path to fame. Indeed, at the event staged in 798 at the Timezone 8 bookshop where Liu Xiaodong launched his new book The Richness of Life: The Personal Photographs of Contemporary Chinese Artist Liu Xiaodong 1984-2006, Liu appeared as a successful celeb and answered questions at an unhurried pace. When we realize that the Three Gorges Immigrant works were auctioned off for RMB 22 million, no one can deny that Liu Xiaodong’s contemporary works are already a Juggernaut phenomenon. At the same time, for the calm and collected researcher, his works already belong to the important documentation of art history, because all agree that Liu ‘respects reality’ and they respect the importance of reality itself.
NOTES:
[1] Li Xianting, The Significance of Accidental Slices of Life: Record of Interview with Liu Xiaodong (Shenghuo zhong ouran pianduan de yiyi: Liu Xiaodong fangtan lu), 14 October 2003.
[2]Yi Ying, Research on the Personal File of Liu Xiaodong (Liu Xiaodong ge’an yanjiu).
[3]Ibid.
[4]Li Xianting, op. cit.
[5]Fan Di’an, ‘Liu Xiaodong or the Narrative of Truth’ (Liu Xiaodong huo zhenshi de chenshi).
[6]Ibid.
[7]Ibid.
[8] Art Research (Meishu yanjiu), no.4, 1990, p.18.
[9]Jiangsu Art Monthly (Jiangsu huakan), no.1, 1992, p.17.
[10]Liu Xiaodong, ‘Respecting Reality’ (Zunzhong xianshi), Art Research (Meishu yanjiu), no.3, 1991.
[11]In 1994, the film Days of Winter and Spring (Dong-chun de rizi) won the Greek Alexander International Youth Film Festival award, and the BBC classified it as one of their catalogue of One Hundred Classic Films. It was exhibited in the New York MOMA International Youth Film Exhibition and was collected for their perpetual archive.
[12]Pi Li, ‘Several Key Words Related to the Warm Bed’ (Guanyu wenchuang de jige guanjianci).
Sunday, 10 February 2008
Translated by Dr. Bruce Gordon Doar