Liu Xiaodong: Slow Homecoming

A joint exhibition by Kunsthalle Düsseldorf and NRW-Forum Düsseldorf

The Chinese artist Liu Xiaodong has long been a superstar in Asia and belongs to the legendary generation of artists who peacefully demonstrated on Tiananmen Square, challenged the system, and years later caused a worldwide sensation. Slow Homecoming will present the world’s first comprehensive retrospective on this exceptional Chinese artist in Düsseldorf.

The double exhibition Slow Homecoming is a world premiere and the first exhibition to focus on the enormous complexity of Liu Xiaodong’s oeuvre. It features works from the years 1983 to 2018, including some 60 paintings, sketches, photographs, overpainted photographs, a digital painting machine, journal notes, and the internationally acclaimed, black-and-white avant-garde film The Days (1993) directed by Wang Xiaoshuai.

Kunsthalle Düsseldorf will offer an overview of Liu’s painting, supplemented by the film, which will be shown on June 18, 2018 at 7pm at the Black Box in Düsseldorf. Produced outside the state-run film system, the film was promptly blacklisted after its release. The Days tells the story of the married couple Dong (played by Liu Xiaodong) and Chun (played by his wife, the artist Yu Hong), who after their studies at the Beijing Art Institute live in destitution, hoping to one day be able to live from their art. The NRW-Forum will focus on the artist’s works of photography as well as his digital engagement with painting and will also present the digital painting machine that was developed in collaboration with scientists. In the exhibition space, pictures taken with a camera installed on the rooftop of the NRW-Forum will be transferred to the canvas by the painting machine in real time. The slowness with which the digital image transforms into an analogue image produces the disorienting impression that the painter is moving the brush over the canvas remotely.

Slow Homecoming approaches the extraordinary complexity of Liu Xiaodong’s work not only through the different media presented at the two exhibition venues, but also through a thematic division into four chapters. The starting point is the town of Jincheng (Liaoing Province), where Liu Xiaodong was born in 1963 and grew up. The second chapter deals with his travels within China, the third with traveling outside his homeland, and the final chapter with his return to Beijing.

Liu Xiaodong belongs to the circle of contemporary artists who caused a worldwide sensation and were recently presented at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. As a painter struggling against the absolutism of collective thinking, he is committed to the diversity of cultures and subjectivity. In his works he deals with the conditions of human existence and addresses global issues such as shifts in population, environmental crises, and economic upheaval. For years he has sensitively and critically dealt with minorities both within and outside China as well as the rapid changes in Chinese society. For the double exhibition, Liu Xiaodong realized the project Transgender/Gay in Berlin, for which he created portraits of the transgender woman Sasha Maria von Halbach and the gay Chinese artist Isaac Chong. Along with his paintings, which capture the immediate impressions of the location, a film realized according to the artist’s concept focuses on the mutual relationship between the artist and his models.

What is unusual about Liu Xiaodong’s artistic practice is that he usually does not paint based on photos or from memory, but in front of the subject, like Cézanne. He is concerned with the physical and psychological confrontation with the outside world and its translation into unique images in the mind parallel to reality, which testify to his deep empathy and sensitivity. He approaches foreign places and people with the greatest possible openness. Out of his obsessive desire to depict the world around him in accordance with his “organically organizing imagination” (Peter Handke), due to his experiences in China and elsewhere, he prefers to rely on his own perception, experience, and perspective rather than on images from the media.

The exhibition is a joint undertaking by Kunsthalle Düsseldorf and NRW-Forum Düsseldorf. It is curated by Heinz-Norbert Jocks in cooperation with Alain Bieber and Gregor Jansen. The exhibition design was created by Francesca Fornasari. The exhibition will be accompanied by a catalog, which includes an interview with Liu Xiaodong and texts by Gregor Jansen, Heinz-Norbert Jocks, and Pi Li.

Exhibition and catalog are realised with the generous support of hesign (Berlin), Lisson Gallery (London), the Ministry of Culture and Science of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia, He Juxing (Beijing), Massimo de Carlo (Milan) and Eslite Gallery (Taipei).