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April 21, 2016 – Review
Liu Ding’s “Li Jianguo Born in 1952”
Heidi Ballet
Some twenty years after the founding of the People’s Republic of China a proposal was made to change the traffic rules so that cars would stop at green lights and go at red, because red was the designated color of action. In the same spirit, citizens named their children after the roles they were to fulfill in the new China. Jianguo is one such name, meaning literally to “construct the country.” Liu Ding’s fictional persona for this solo show at Antenna Space was born just three years after the nation was established in 1949.
Liu Ding is both an artist and a curator. This double identity is clear from the first impressions of this exhibition, which appears as a tightly curated group show in which each work is part of a puzzle comprising the art world, state ideology, and “the West.” The walls of the gallery are divided into horizontal blue and white bands and the colorful tiles of the original floor left visible. The space is filled with more than 30 stylistically diverse selection of works; there are collaged photographs separated from their sources (Figures taken out of Context, 2015); realist, figurative paintings executed in a colorful palette (such as …