Liu Xiaodong: Your Friends

From August 8, 2021 to October 10, 2021, UCCA Edge presents its first solo exhibition, Liu Xiaodong: Your Friends. A pioneering painter of a new realism in China, Liu Xiaodong (b. 1963, Jincheng, Liaoning province, lives and works in Beijing) emerged in the 1990s, known for his acute and lucid depictions of the minute changes he observed in different slices of China’s rapidly urbanizing and developing society. Since the early 2000s, he has been known to work onsite in locations of particular poignance, from the construction site of the Three Gorges Dam to the U.S.-Mexico border during the Trump administration. This exhibition charts Liu’s artistic development in the decade since his 2010 exhibition “Hometown Boy” at UCCA Beijing, bringing together more than 120 new and existing works, including his latest series “Your Friends,” as well as sketches, diaries, and a new documentary film by long-time collaborator Yang Bo. Liu Xiaodong: Your Friends is curated by UCCA Director Philip Tinari and UCCA Curator Yan Fang. 

Divided into three sections, this exhibition follows the artist’s footprints from small-town Northeast China, tracking his travels throughout China and abroad, and ending with the series “Your Friends,” completed upon his return to China after an extended pandemic-year stay in New York. Throughout, Liu maintains his sensitive and steadfast gaze on the lived experiences and inner life of ordinary people under the ever-evolving conditions of social reality. Liu’s shifting subjects allow for an extended meditation on the intimate relationships and social relations that bind us to each other. 

The first section, “The Anonymous Walker,” brings together previous works exemplary of the artist’s photographic eye in his realist painting practice. Here, Liu immerses himself in the lives of others as a painter, creating warm, humanistic works en plein air that engage with the geopolitical specificity and narratives of marginalized and transitory communities in places including his hometown, the Chinatown neighborhoods of Tuscany, refugee routes in Europe, ship breaking yards in the Bangladesh port city of Chittagong, and ultimately, his adopted hometown of Beijing.

The second section, “Lands Revisited,” features square portraits, still lifes, photographs, paintings on photographs, and two watercolor notebooks—Heitukeng Compositions and Half a Lifetime—that together capture the two-fold meaning of lands revisited for Liu: his observations of life in pandemic-era New York, where he and his artist wife Yu Hong first set foot in as young artists decades ago; and the studies of his family and friends made upon a recent return to his father’s hometown Heitukeng in Northeast China. These watercolors are buoyed by a narrative sensibility previously not found in his larger-scale works, revealing a more personal and emotional side of his practice.

The final section, “Your Friends,” features new portraits of those nearest and dearest to the artist in life and art, as he contemplates the depth of these decades-long connections, their senescence and mortality. Subjects include renowned writer Ah Cheng and leading directors in China’s “Sixth Generation” cinema Wang Xiaoshuai and Zhang Yuan, as well as Liu’s mother, brother, and Yu Hong. The title of the exhibition was inspired by Zhang Yuan’s constant use of the phrase “your friends” during their portrait sessions.

The accompanying exhibition catalogue reproduces the works on view, alongside a selection of the artist’s diaries and stills from the titular documentary film. It includes an essay by Philip Tinari that discusses these recent works, a text by anthropologist Xiang Biao that explores bodily imagery in Liu’s paintings, and a dialogue between Yan Fang and the artist about the curatorial themes of the exhibition. The catalogue is designed by Studio Pianpian He & Max Harvey and published by Zhejiang Photographic Press.