Culture

The boy is back in town

By Liu Yujie (China Daily)
Updated: 2011-01-12 08:00

Liu Xiaodong stands beside one of his paintings, Bent Rib, on the walls at UCCA. Photos provided to China Daily

If you were busy last year and had no time for art, there is one exhibition you should try and make time to see in the new year.

Liu Xiaodong, one of China's most respected painters, recently launched his new exhibition Hometown Boy in the Ullens Center of Contemporary Art (UCCA). The works explore his thoughts and feelings on the changes his hometown has undergone over the past 30 years.

"We were once hired farmhands, poor peasants, rich peasants or landlords. We were the proletariat, the working class, workers and peasants. Now, we are making great strides, moving single-mindedly toward the future, becoming the propertied class - and we've got the bricks and cement to prove it," Liu laments in his introduction.

Liu left Jincheng, Liaoning province, in 1980 when he was 17 to study arts in Beijing, where he has lived ever since. But every year he returns to his hometown for the Spring Festival. Last year he returned home to paint, sketch and observe the people and places of his childhood. In doing so Liu confronted a range of complex emotions and questions. The landscape was familiar, but the people had changed.

Top: Xiao Dou Hanging Out at the Pool Hall, oil on canvas, 2010. Bottom: Shu Jun with His Chubby Son, oil on canvas, 2010.

Jincheng is a small industrial town and Liu recalls his childhood impressions of "thick billowing smoke from 10-meter-high smokestacks, steam whistles blowing, crowds of workers changing shifts".

The workers' families used to live in single-story bungalows, and the housing was divided into wards, which Liu said was paradise for mischievous kids. However, over the years, the fields and ditches were replaced with identical multistory buildings and the factories fell silent after the State-owned enterprises were restructured.

"It was like seeing a vast army reduced to a supply brigade, with no one left to carry on the war," writes Liu. "The friends I knew in childhood have become fat. I once painted their portraits because I was hoping to get into art school. Now, 30 years later, I am painting them again, hoping that I can finish their portraits before all of them are laid off."

The occasions Liu chose to paint are often banal, and the settings commonplace. But from Liu's paintings, we see a China filled with hope, ambition, cunning, bewilderment, anger, indifference, longing and despair.

Or in the words of Jeff Kelly, an independent art critic and curator, "they are the old faces of the new China, and they embody the weary countenance of history". Kelly describes Liu's work during the past two decades as "the psychic landscape of the new China".

Liu is adroit at documenting his artistic process in meticulous detail, including photographs, drawings, diary entries, to add more dimensions to the stories he tells.

He is also very involved with the world of film. He has collaborated with many filmmakers in the past, and feels comfortable working in front of the camera and painting on set.

This time, his exhibition features a documentary on Liu and Jincheng by Taiwan director Hou Hsiao-hsien.

"Hou's involvement really increases the power of these paintings, because they all have a 'background story' that needs to be explained. The film helps deepen our understanding of the paintings and makes the project much more complete," says Liu.

Three separate spaces in UCCA's big hall display 26 new oil paintings, over 200 pages of framed diary entries, and the documentary by Hou.

Visitors first walk along dark corridors with Liu's diary entries on walls, written on paper produced by the local paper mill. Filled with notes, captions, sketches and photos, the diaries show amusing anecdotes, keen observations, background stories, recollections and biographical sketches of Liu's childhood friends.

They will then step into the "painting room", where Liu's Jincheng paintings are displayed.

The smallest canvases are studies for larger paintings, or still-lives of some details that triggered a memory of the past.

The medium-sized canvases are paintings of Liu's childhood friends in settings that reflect their lives today.

And four large canvases depict groups of people in settings that hold a special significance for the artist, because they illustrate how time has altered his hometown.

In the black-velvet-curtained "screening room", Hou's documentary film, also titled Hometown Boy, is screened at regular intervals.

Visitors can also take a look at the never-before-seen set of seven copperplate etchings, featuring black and white photographs from the artist's personal collection, and a sketch and short caption in his own hand, which offer some insight into Liu's development as an artist.

Each painting is given enough space for contemplation at the gallery.